Image Generation and Visualization System for Ionosphere Dynamics

This work shows the development of a data interpolation and visualization system for Earth’s ionosphere, based on the results of an ionosphere dynamics model – the Sheffield University Plasmasphere-Ionosphere Model (SUPIM). During the system construction, several ionospheric simulation runs are performed at different geographic longitudes. These "profiles" are mapped from magnetic coordinates to geographic coordinates. Then, a data interpolation technique is proposed to obtain the ion concentration values for neighborhood of simulated points, in homogeneous grid. The resulting interpolated data is recorded in a file format that can be used on a software tool for visualization of Earth science data. Although 2-dimensional images of ionosphere Vertical Total Electron Content (VTEC) forecast can be well shown using a sequence of static images, Keyhole Markup Language (KML) codec was created, allowing more interactive data visualization also on other platforms like Google Earth.