Clouds are an important aspect of rendering outdoor scenes. This paper describes a cloud system that extends texture splatting on particles to model a dozen cloud types (e.g., stratus, cumulus congestus, cumulonimbus), an improvement over earlier systems that modeled only one type of cumulus. We also achieve fast real-time rendering, even for scenes of dense overcast coverage, which was a limit...

The North East (NE) region of India is prone to severe thunderstorm during pre monsoon period. These premonsoon precipitations are measured at Guwahati (26 17’ N, 91 77’ E) using a laser based particle size and velocity (PARSIVEL) disdrometer from 15 April to 31 May 2010 under a national field campaign named Severe Thunderstorm Observational and Regional Modeling (STORM). For the improved under...

The Maritime Continent Thunderstorm Experiment (MCTEX) provided another opportunity to study tropical cirrus and anvil clouds. The component of the experiment that included the lidar and radars was supported by the ARM Program. The experiment has provided a further set of data to categorize tropical cirrus in terms of their cloud-radiation interactions, a central theme of the ARM Program. The d...

Weather monitoring systems, such as Doppler radars, collect a high volume of measurements with fine spatial and temporal resolutions that provide opportunities to study many convective weather events. This study examines the spatial and temporal characteristics of severe thunderstorm life cycles in central United States mainly covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas during the warm season...

Lightning is the result of the buildup and discharge of electrical energy. The air in a lightning strike is heated to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It is this rapid heating of the air that produces the shock wave that results in thunder. A cloud-to-ground lightning strike begins as an invisible channel of electrically-charged air moving from the cloud toward the ground. When one channel nears an o...

Single-moment microphysics schemes have long enjoyed popularity for their simplicity and efficiency. However, in this article it is argued through theoretical considerations, idealized thunderstorm simulations, and radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE) simulations that the assumptions inherent in these parameterizations can induce large errors in the proper representation of clouds and their f...

The paper introduces a new, computationally inexpensive, real-time method of simulation of clouds for dynamic particle-based cloud rendering. The method covers such phenomena as atmospheric fronts, stable and unstable balance, thunderstorms, simplified simulation of middle and high clouds, correlation between wind and clouds and even tornadoes. The simulation is based on several simple numeric ...

Deep convection induced by large forest fires is an efficient mechanism for transport of aerosol particles and trace gases into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UT/LS). For many pyro-cumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) as well as other cases of severe convection without fire forcing, radiometric observations of cloud tops in the thermal infrared (IR) reveal characteristic structures, fea...