LSU Visualization Looks Beyond Deepwater Horizon

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Researchers at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology are using high performance visualization to explore the fate of oil spilled during the Deepwater Horizon incident in 2010.

In simple terms, researchers from the LSU’s DOCS, namely Dr. Dubravko Justic, Lixia Wang, Dr. Nan Walker and others, make multiple geoscientific and model simulation data sets available to me, and I develop visualization methods to highlight features in these data sets that often allow us to see more than what was originally expected,” said Dr. Werner Benger from LSU. “Simulations performed in our project predict that BP oil particles originating in open waters close to the Gulf’s coastline flow under tidal influence into the Barataria Bay estuary and some of them return back into the open water,” he added.

The ancient art of cartography is an inspiration to Benger, who’s method of graphic rendering produces results similar to cartographic map views that use colors to represent ranges of elevation, known as hypsometric tints. The use of hypsometric tints is said to have been invented by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century.

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