Visualizing Space Weather: Acquiring and Rendering Data of Earth's Magnetosphere

Abstract: This thesis aims to describe the work and results of an intership at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and part of the OpenSpace project. The project is a collaboration between Linköping University in Norrköping, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Community Coordinated Modeling Center at NASA outside Washington D.C. The work done during this intership has been to research and implement visualizations for Earth’s magnetosphere based on data from scientific space weather models. An interface was developed to access and read the data sets into the OpenSpace software, where the data is be rendered using volume ray-casting and fieldline tracing. The fieldlines are a major part of this thesis and every step of the way from the seed points to the rendering are presented and discussed. All of these features and functionality have been implemented in the OpenSpace software which will continue to grow towards its goal of being able to interactively visualize space in a multi-screen environment in real time.