Interactive Visualization of Transient Solar Wind Phenomena for Space Weather Applications

We present a volume rendering system developed for the visualization and manipulation of 3D heliospheric volume data such as solar wind density, velocity and magnetic field. Our system exploits the capabilities of the VolumePro 1000 board 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. Many operations have been implemented such as stereo/perspective views, animations of time-sequences, and determination of CME volumes and masses. We will show examples of three-dimensional heliospheric volumes from tomographic reconstructions of density and velocity using real-time interplanetary scintillation (IPS) data. In the near future we expect to add reconstructions based on the all-sky observations from the recently launched Solar Mass Ejection Imager and employ our system to interactively analyze and visualize the abundant information embedded in these data.