The Depth of Color

After a short hour meeting this afternoon Steve had an interesting idea about measuring the validity of entrainment rate assumptions (plenty of notes, more to come) and I have a better understanding of a method used in Kuang and Bretherton 2006 (KB06). It came up that the moist static energy (MSE) histograms I have made after KB06 are actually 3D so I thought I'd see if it's easy to make a gif out of different angles using matlab and the free software GIMP, and it was easy!

Do you see color as depth? In the plot below, the colors represent the value of the mass flux occurring at all grid points in the Giga-LES simulation that have a particular MSE at a particular height. The animation below first rotates so you can see that the updraft mass flux (red) has a maximum at low levels, and the downdraft mass flux (blue) is strongest near 3 and 8 km. A further rotation shows another angle, illustrating that the updraft mass flux is occurring for higher values of MSE compared to the downdraft.

The below is a snapshot at 12 hours into the 24 hour simulation, representing the entirety of the mass flux in the volume, over an area almost 42 billion square meters in size filled with hundreds of thousands of simulated clouds.

All of these views can be seen in the original orientation if you can see the depth of color!