Visualizing Enlil and EUHFORIA CME Propagation Models using an Accessible Interactive 3-Dimensional Data Visualization Tool

Solar wind models such as Enlil and EUHFORIA are critical to informing space weather forecasters of the direction and speed of coronal mass ejections CMEs and informing studies of CME evolution. These models calculate the propagation of the solar wind throughout the 3D heliosphere, but large data volumes and current visualization capabilities have traditionally been restricted to 2D planes intersecting the Earth or other solar system satellites.

Here, we present an update on the new open source and publicly accessible visualization capability we have been developing to take advantage of the full 3D data volumes produced by the Enlil model, and more recently the EUHFORIA model. With this tool, a forecaster or other user can interactively visualize the expansion of a CME over time and outside of the plane intersecting the Earth. We have been collaborating closely with researchers and forecasters at the Met Office in the UK and the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in the USA to develop a tool to enable full view of the heliosphere in a manner that can be tailored to both of these types of users. We have also been collaborating with NASA's Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), as well as the developers of both the Enlil and EUHFORIA models in order to connect the visualization tool to the model output from these two models. To enable this capability given the very large output data volumes produced by these models, the visualization interface is accessible via a standard web browser, with both the output data and visualization engine residing together within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud-based model staging platform computing environment, which permits interactive visualization without the need for a user to transfer large data volumes to their local computer. In this presentation, we will discuss our collaborative engagement with space weather forecasters and researchers worldwide to design this new tailorable interactive 3D visualization tool, and will demonstrate use of the actual visualization tool with different data sets.