After the storm: considerations for information visualization

“Study of a Numerically Modeled Severe Storm” is a well known animation within the scientific visualization community. The visualization is among the best of its genre, featuring full storyboarding, well chosen representations, high quality rendering, and professional narration. We recently revisited the thunderstorm to consider what we would do differently if we were to make that video again. We wanted to demonstrate several principles of effective information presentation, drawing from the fields of graphic design and visual perception. Our purpose was not to find fault with bad visualization. Rather, we wanted to study how to make a good thing better. The original video was produced using the modeling, animation, and rendering capabilities of Wavefront´s Advanced Visualizer. To facilitate comparison, we did most of the current work with the same software. However, many points discussed here apply to interactive visualization tools as well. The original visualization and our revised version are both based on data generated by a simulation run on a Cray supercomputer at NCSA. The simulation models the genesis and lifetime of a severe storm by solving a set of time dependent equations over a collection of regularly spaced grid points in a three dimensional rectangular space