Heimbach/Nguyen research wins top SC18 visualization award

An ICES visualization of the Arctic Ocean’s changes which exemplify shifts in Earth’s global climate, has won a top award at the international Supercomputing 2018 (SC18) Conference.

ICES Professor Patrick Heimbach, ICES Research Scientist An Nguyen, ICES Postdoc Fellow Arash Bigdeli, ICES Research Scientist Victor Ocana, teamed with TACC Research Scientist Greg Foss and TACC Undergraduate Research Assistant Briana Bradshaw to create the video.

The SC18 Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Award honors the year’s most instrumental movies in high performance computing. Movies are judged based on overall quality, how they illuminate science, and on creative innovations in the production process.

“Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Interactions” features the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the five major world oceans, and a unique physical and ecological system. With the recent shifts in global climate, which are amplified in the Arctic, the animation illuminates pathways by which these profound changes spread within the Arctic Ocean and connect with the adjacent ocean basins. Scientists, including those in ICES’ Computational Research in Ice and Oceans Group (CRIOS) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), are working to document these changes to provide a broad assessment of their local and global impact. The Arctic’s hostile environment makes comprehensive measurements challenging, calling for simulation-based science to support quantitative understanding.

A critical element of the simulation is its visualization of the complex time-evolving three-dimensional ocean state. The award-winning animation visualizes results of a high-resolution data-constrained numerical simulation of the circulation of the Arctic Ocean. Different view angles and zooms highlight emergent features, key to understanding some of the Arctic Ocean’s most important processes.

The visualization serves as a public-outreach component of an NSF-funded project aimed at understanding and quantifying the Arctic ocean-sea ice mean state and its changes in response to the Earth’s recent warming.

The research is carried out at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Institute for Geophysics, and the Jackson School of Geosciences, UT. The animation is currently being shown at the exhibition “Exploring the Arctic Ocean,” which runs at the UT Visual Arts Center in Austin through the fall 2018 semester.

Further discussion of the work occurs:

Nov. 27 with artist/photographer Chris Linder,

Nov. 28 at noon with curator Ulrike Heine,

Nov. 28 at 5 p.m. with artist/activist John Quigley,

Dec. 5 with artist/videographer Olaf Otto Becker, and

Dec. 6 with ICES/TACC researchers An Nguyen/Greg Foss.