Exploring the evolution of pressure-perturbations to understand atmospheric phenomena

Atmospheric sciences is the study of physical and chemical phenomena occurring within the Earth's atmosphere. The study entails understanding the state of the Earth's atmosphere, how it is changing over time and why. Understanding how various weather events develop and evolve is often conducted through retrospective analysis of past atmospheric events. Atmospheric scientists can then utilize tools to better predict potential hazards and provide earlier warnings for events that may impact life and property. Several atmospheric state variables can be measured to identify high-impact events, one of which is surface atmospheric pressure. Many weather events are characterized by variations in surface pressure from the mean pressure value (i.e., pressure-perturbations). Accordingly, there is significant interest in extracting and tracking pressure-perturbations both spatially and temporally to better understand the evolution of weather events. Here, we present a visualization and analysis environment that allows interactive exploration of pressure-perturbation data sets. Our system, for the first time, enables atmospheric scientists to interactively explore the spatiotemporal behaviors of pressure-perturbations for a range of values and provides support to leverage other conventional data sets such as radar imagery and wind observations. It also allows atmospheric scientists to evaluate model and parameter sensitivity, which is difficult if not impossible with conventional visualization tools in atmospheric sciences. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach for retrospective analysis using different case studies of recorded severe weather events.