Visualising earth's magnetosphere interacting with the solar wind using numerical methods and semi-transparent surfaces

Sammanfattning

Data visualization is a field dedicated to effectively showing large amounts of collected data. A field where data visualization has shown promising results in its ways to effectively answer questions is the fundamental research of the universe. This thesis describes how to visualize the Earth’s magnetosphere as it interacts with the solar wind, using numerical methods, semi-transparent surfaces, and contours in OpenSpace. A magnetosphere module was implemented into OpenSpace, and the OpenSpace GUI was extended to give the user a possibility to interact with the visualization. The implemented algorithm in the magnetosphere module was measured in terms of speed, robustness, and user understanding. The implementation made it possible to visualize a simple model of the Earth’s magnetosphere, both when it interacts and when it does not interact with the solar wind. The measured speed showed a trend of a linear increase when more magnetic field lines were added to the visualization, where the run time was low for all tests. The algorithm was shown to be robust in its creation of the magnetosphere. When asked about what the users thought of the implemented visualization, a majority were positive and thought it to be a good complement to learning about the Earth’s magnetosphere. For a realistic model, there is a possibility that the speed and robustness may get worse, but the results are good for a simple model. To make the visualization itself more informative, more highlights are needed for important parts of the structure, as well as different colors that differ on which surfaces belong to which geographical pole.