Visualization of Remotely-Sensed Heliospheric Plasmas for Space Weather Applications

We demonstrate a software application designed for the display and interactive manipulation of 3D heliospheric volume data, such as solar wind density, velocity and magnetic field. The Volume Explorer software exploits the capabilities of the Volume Pro 1000 (from TeraRecon, Inc.), a low-cost 64-bit PCI board capable of rendering a 512-cubed array of volume data in real time at up to 30 frames per second on a standard PC. The application allows stereo and perspective views, and animations of time-sequences. We show examples of three-dimensional heliospheric volume data derived from tomographic reconstructions based on heliospheric remote sensing observations of the heliospheric density and velocity structure. Currently these reconstructions are based on archival IPS and Thomson scattering data. In the near future we expect to add reconstructions based on the all-sky observations from the recently launched Solar Mass Ejection Imager.