Owen Kaluza: Southern Ocean Circulation - Visualising high res bottom water layers in 3D
Intro:
We visualised and 3d animated high res ocean model output in the Southern Ocean to produce animations to help understand and communicate flows of dense bottom water layers around Antarctica, all the work is available to the public and uses freely available open source tools.
Methods:
From a high resolution Pan-Antarctic ACCESS-OM simulation at 1/40° resolution over an 85° latitude band (14400 x 3384 cells * depth levels) output at 3hr intervals for a year, we created a 3d model of bottom water layers simultaneously showing 4 different density isosurfaces.
This was visualised using open source tools in a Jupyter Notebook environment, showing the data in context with high res bathymetry and topography of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. From this 3D model we then produced animations highlighting the movements of bottom water over the continental shelf to the ocean depths throughout the seasons.
Results
These animations were compiled into an explainer video with narration informing how these phenomena impact the global climate (due for release before the workshop so shall be linked from the poster)
The raw animations can be found on Vimeo and are released under a creative commons attribution license for all to use.
The notebooks used to create the animations are in a public Github repository and available for researchers to apply the same techniques to other model runs.
Audience
Researchers interested in the Antarctic & Southern Ocean region, climate scientists, the general public