14 DAY TRIAL // On February 6, meteorologist Jim Cantore, now working with The Weather Channel, got to walk around a tornado. No, the storm that he explored wasn't a real one. It was a 3D virtual replica put together by scientists with Virginia Tech, a university in the US.
That's right, it looks like technology and science have come so far that brainiacs can recreate major weather events in 3D and then study their anatomy in unprecedented detail. Sheer coolness aside, such experiments are actually quite useful.
Thus, it is by studying 3D virtual replicas of one storm or another that researchers can gain a better understanding of how such weather events come into being and behave. Data they obtain in this manner can help save lives by making weather forecasts just a tad more accurate.
Recreating a tornado in 3D is no walk in the park
In a report detailing their work, the scientists behind this research project explain that the tornado that they successfully recreated in 3D inside a research facility known as the Cube was the one that hit the city of Moore in Oklahoma back in May 2013, killing 24 people.
It is understood that, to put together their 3D replica of this catastrophic weather event, the scientists used radar data concerning the amount of rain that the tornado dumped on the city of Moore and the direction and the speed of the floating particulates unleashed by the storm.
The immersive environment obtained by compiling and analyzing this data was then ran inside the Cube. Mind you, the researchers even went as far as to include the landscape of Moore in their simulation. To explore this environment, Jim Cantore used a virtual reality headset.
“It’s like a game environment in which you are embedded in the computer. You can then study storms from different perspectives than in the field. You can peel away the outer layers of rain so you can see the business end of the storm. It is a more effective way of looking at storm structure,” says specialist Dave Carroll.
Virtual reality isn't just for tornadoes or other storms
True, recreating tornadoes and other major weather events in 3D is pretty cool. Still, the fact of the matter is that scientists with NASA and programming enthusiasts with Microsoft now have an even cooler project in the works.
In a nutshell, these brainiacs are using data obtained with the help of orbiters and rovers to generate a 3D virtual replica of Mars' surface. Otherwise put, they are hard at work engineering virtual replicas of Martian landscapes.
When these landscapes are completed, astronomers will be able to explore them from a first-person perspective with the help of a high-tech pair of goggles. Mind you, they will even be able to interact with this alien holographic environment. Pretty neat, right?
