Hello everybody and welcome to another week of immersive tech content here at VRFocus. There is, as always, plenty to discuss this week regardless of the type of ‘Reality’ you are personally interested in. But before we get to any of that we need to start things off with Monday’s edition of Life in 360°.
The last few years it certainly feels like we’ve seen more and more extreme weather, and stronger and stronger instances of regular weather. Just over a year ago, from September to early October 2017 the island of Puerto Rico (as well as Dominica) was hit by the devastating Hurricane Maria. A hurricane that led to the island’s infrastructure being effectively annihilated and a death toll now believed to be in the thousands.
But how did Maria become so strong, and so very, very fast? Well, in this video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and it’s Goddard Space Flight Center they combine an array of data into a 3D model to explain.
“Two days before Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the NASA-Japan Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory satellite captured a 3-D view of the storm. At the time Maria was a Category 1 hurricane. The 3-D view reveals the processes inside the hurricane that would fuel the storm’s intensification to a category 5 within 24 hours.
For the first time in 360-degrees, this data visualization takes you inside the hurricane. The precipitation satellite has an advanced radar that measures both liquid and frozen water. The brightly colored dots show areas of rainfall, where green and yellow show low rates and red and purple show high rates. At the top of the hurricane, where temperatures are colder, blue and purple dots show light and heavy frozen precipitation. The colored areas below the dots show how much rain is falling at the surface.”
via Mint VR