Horace Mitchell
Software Integration and Visualization
Office, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Fun with Flows: Visualizing Moving Data

Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

The art of scientific visualization is concerned with visualizing data to make it more understandable and dramatic. Time-dependent flow field data can be especially challenging in this regard. At the Scientific Visualization Studio, we have made some interesting breakthroughs in flow visualization in the last few years, and the results are increasingly showing up in our visualization products. I will describe some of the techniques we have developed and show the progression of the techniques from rudimentary tests to finished products - including examples from the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and solar wind.

Horace Mitchell received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from Rice University in Houston, Texas. After receiving his doctorate in physics in 1978, he joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) as a research physicist, studying plasma transport and instability processes in the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere at the Naval Research Laboratory. There he developed an interest in visualizing his scientific computations, which subsequently led him to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1991 as head of the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), which was founded in 1988. Since 1997, Dr. Mitchell has led the SVS in producing visualizations of NASA's scientific data for use in public media outlets, using many processes from the film and animation industry. Some of the major productions that he has directed or produced include "Multisensor Fire Observations", "A Tour of the Cryosphere", "Frozen", "Towers in the Tempest", and "Sentinels of the Heliosphere". One of the groundbreaking efforts of the SVS has been to put its thousands of products on the web for use by the entire world, thus bringing NASA research and mission results into the broadcast media, museums, documentaries, and educational institutions.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Helen-Nicole Kostis

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