CloudGen™/Weather Toolkit - 3-D Weather Cloud Databases

The CloudGen™/Weather Toolkit is a collection of tools for generating 3-dimensional databases for modeling and visualizing weather clouds. The CloudGen™/Weather tool is used to generate density databases, CloudRad™ to facetize the cloud surfaces and perform radiative transfer calculations, and CloudTex™ to generate cloud surface textures. A flowchart of the steps (tools) and databases involved in generating databases for use with CloudScape^® forms the main CloudGen/Weather Toolkit window, shown in the image to the right.

CloudGen™/Weather can (1) translate databases from the U.S. Air Force CSSM code and generate clouds using (2) an ensemble of puffs or (3) a fractally  modulated cloud layer. A single puff, illuminated from the right is shown in the image on the left using the visualization tool included with the CloudGen/Weather tool. The radiance along a trace through the image is shown in the plot on the right.

CloudRad™ calculates the scattering and extinction properties of the cloud particulates and facetizes the cloud surface based on incremental extinction. It generates levels of detail for the surface mesh and calculates the bidirectional radiance and transmission using an approximate, but fast and robust solution to the radiative transfer equations. On the left is an image of a 2-level CSSM database and on the right is the solar illumination texture used to cast cloud shadows on the ground.

CloudTex™ generates textures to add small-scale structure to the cloud models. Unstructured and structured cloud images are shown in the images on the left and right.

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