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Although texture slicing based volume rendering method has been widely used in data visualization, applying it to render atmospheric data that span entire globe has always been a challenging task. The difficulties are threefold. First, conventional volume rendering methods are used to process data referenced in a Cartesian coordinate system, whereas atmospheric data are georeferenced to a geodetic coordinate system. This difference brings about complications in texture sampling. Second, planet-scaled atmospheric data, especially those in high resolution, exacerbate performance issue in rendering time complexity. Third, spherical shaped bounding volume of Earth's atmosphere makes the calculation of proxy geometry difficult. In this paper, a new method is proposed to tackle the challenges aforementioned. The coordinates of volume vertices and textures are represented in spherical coordinate system to avoid the accuracy loss due to conversion between Cartesian and geodetic coordinate system. The calculation of proxy geometry is worked out. The proposed method is tested by being implemented into a rendering engine visualizing atmospheric data set.

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Over recent years, several visualization tools that offer advanced threedimensional (3D) rendering techniques, while still showing good performance for large data sets, have been developed. However, how to provide an intuitive way to combine traditional two-dimensional (2D) methods essential in operational weather forecasting and new 3D techniques welcomed in atmospheric research is not fully investigated, if not overlooked, in these tools. The paper presents MeteoExplorer: a software tool designed to analyse and visualize atmospheric and geoscience data. It consists of a developer-orientedcrossplatform foundation framework and several applications built upon the framework. The framework is developed with C++ on the central processing unit side and shader languages on the graphics processing unit (GPU) side. Modules in the framework are loosely coupled with minimum interdependencies to facilitate code reuse and improve code efficiency. Compared with other software tools, the framework provides distinctive features, including a unified framework that integrates both 2D and 3D rendering context, comprehensive support of popular data formats and computing platforms, decent rendition quality via the export of vector graphics and page layout customization, and interactive composition of synoptic charts. Based on the foundation libraries, the software can develop web, desktop and mobile applications for meteorological purposes. These applications support the analysis and visualization of numerous data set types, as well as the interactive content creation. Met-eoExplorer is an exploratory project that provides forecasters with new techniques for climate diagnosis and forecasts.

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