Visualization algorithms

This section documents how the main visualization techniques in Met.3D are implemented on the GPU. It complements Actors, which describes the actor framework itself, and the user manual, which describes what the actors do from a user’s point of view.

All of these techniques share one primitive — sampling an NWP grid at an arbitrary position in longitude/latitude/pressure space. That primitive is described separately in Sampling NWP grids on the GPU and is assumed to be known here.

The algorithms and their rationale go back to Chapter 5.3.4 of Rautenhaus (2015); the pages below describe the current implementation.

• Horizontal and vertical sections
• Isosurface raycasting
• Direct-volume raycasting
• Normal curves
• Trajectory rendering
• Surface topography