As we pen this article, the outside sky is gloomy and rain has started to torrent down but in Subang Jaya this is a common phenomena as Malaysia being in the Tropics we get rainfall nearly every other day and they are usually nothing to worry about. But there is a massive storm brewing in the US and there is already a hurricane warning with flash floods has been issued. The same for Hong Kong and Taiwan, as Super Typhoon Mangkut rages across Asia with airlines having been advised to be cautious. To give perspective on the severity of these storm and the damage they can cause, a particular weather channel gave a grim scenario using 3D graphics it has been testing since 2016 to illustrate the point.

The Weather Channel in the US broadcast its first ever live simulation on Hurricane Florence’s threatening flash flood using graphics processing technology more common to video game makers. See video below.

Hurricane Florence slammed into the southeastern shore of North Carolina early Friday morning. Wind speeds of the category 1 hurricane have reached 90 miles per hour, and up to 40 inches of rain have been forecast to drench the region. Warnings for life-threatening storm surge flooding have been in effect along the North Carolina coast.

The Weather Channel in 2016 began working with this immersive technology to better display the severity of conditions with graphically intense simulations using high performance computing. This type of immersive mixed reality  for broadcast news has only recently become a technique used to convey the severity of life-threatening weather conditions.

Working closely with Nvidia and their GPU’s, the weather simulation displays the forecast via green screen, which wraps around the broadcaster with real-time visuals in sync with the broadcast. It’s science-based: taking wind speed, direction, rainfall and countless other meteorological data points fed into the 3D renderings to provide accurate visualizations.