ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Articles | Volume IV-4/W2
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-4-W2-77-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-4-W2-77-2017
19 Oct 2017
 | 19 Oct 2017

SPATIOTEMPORAL VISUALIZATION OF TIME-SERIES SATELLITE-DERIVED CO2 FLUX DATA USING VOLUME RENDERING AND GPU-BASED INTERPOLATION ON A CLOUD-DRIVEN DIGITAL EARTH

S. Wu, Y. Yan, Z. Du, F. Zhang, and R. Liu

Keywords: Cloud-driven Digital Earth, Volume Rendering, GPU-based Interpolation, Time-series Satellite Data, Ocean Carbon Cycle

Abstract. The ocean carbon cycle has a significant influence on global climate, and is commonly evaluated using time-series satellite-derived CO2 flux data. Location-aware and globe-based visualization is an important technique for analyzing and presenting the evolution of climate change. To achieve realistic simulation of the spatiotemporal dynamics of ocean carbon, a cloud-driven digital earth platform is developed to support the interactive analysis and display of multi-geospatial data, and an original visualization method based on our digital earth is proposed to demonstrate the spatiotemporal variations of carbon sinks and sources using time-series satellite data. Specifically, a volume rendering technique using half-angle slicing and particle system is implemented to dynamically display the released or absorbed CO2 gas. To enable location-aware visualization within the virtual globe, we present a 3D particlemapping algorithm to render particle-slicing textures onto geospace. In addition, a GPU-based interpolation framework using CUDA during real-time rendering is designed to obtain smooth effects in both spatial and temporal dimensions. To demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method, a series of satellite data is applied to simulate the air-sea carbon cycle in the China Sea. The results show that the suggested strategies provide realistic simulation effects and acceptable interactive performance on the digital earth.