Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics © Springer-Verlag 1998 Volume Visualizing High-Resolution Turbulence Computations 1

Abstract. Using several volume-visualization packages including a new package we developed called Volsh, we investigate a 25-Gbyte dataset from a 256 3 computation of decaying quasi-geostrophic turbulence. We compare surface fitting and direct volume rendering approaches, as well as a number of techniques for producing feature-revealing spatial cues. We also study the pros and cons of using batch and interactive tools for visualizing the data and discuss the relative merits of using each approach. We find that each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages, and a combination of tools is most effective at exploring large four-dimensional scalar datasets. The resulting visualizations show several new phenomena in the dynamics of coherent vortices. 1