Real-Time Simulation of Cumulus Clouds through SkewT/LogP Diagrams

• Autor(a) principal: Duarte, Rui
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Gomes, Abel
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/8306
• topic: Weather cloud rendering; Weather cloud simulation; SkewT/LogP diagram; Natural phenomena rendering

Modeling, simulation, and realistic rendering of natural phenomena have been important goals in computer graphics for decades. Clouds, as a natural phenomenon, represent a real challenge because their birth, life, and death are amorphous and dynamic in nature. As a consequence, cloud simulation is very time-consuming when using physically-based methods. This paper presents a real-time cloud simulation method based on SkewT/LogP diagrams to overcome this time performance problem. These diagrams allow us to simulate 3D clouds from sounding data made public worldwide by weather agencies. More specifically, a SkewT/LogP diagram describes the vertical motion of a cloud in the atmosphere, i.e., our cloud simulator system is based on physics but avoids solving differential equations of cloud motion to achieve real-time rates. We have also built a visual tool for 2D SkewT/LogP diagrams that allows us to inspect, control and simulate the thermodynamic process of ascending clouds in the atmosphere, as well as a 3D synthetic environment where clouds are advected by buoyant forces. This lightweight physically-based technique enables the incorporation of our cloud simulator in systems tied to important industries, namely movies, virtual environments, and video games.