Current Trends and Demands in Visualization in the Geosciences

Geosciences, along with many other disciplines in science and engineering, faces an exponential increase in the amount of data generated from observation, experiment and large-scale, high-resolution 3-D numerical simulations. In this communication we describe the fundamentals of visualization necessary to meet these challenges. We present several alternative methodologies such as 2D/3D feature extraction, segmentation methods, and flow topology, to help better understand the physical structure of the data. We use AMIRA from TGS to demonstrate our concepts. Examples are drawn from fields in computational fluid dynamics, 3-D mantle convection and seismic tomography. Finally, we present our perspective on the future of visualization.