Mixed layer depth animation

This example animates the mixed layer depth (MLD) from the ACCESS-OM2 global ocean-sea ice model. The files loaded for these animations are located at:

/g/data/cj50/access-om2/raw-output/access-om2-01/01deg_jra55v140_iaf/output2*/ocean/ocean-2d-mld-1-daily-mean-ym_20*.nc

and the variable name is:

mld

Note

The path contains the wildcard * which allows the load of all the files contained in the directories output2* and the netCDF files named ocean-2d-mld-1-daily-mean-ym_20*.nc`

The animation shows the mixed layer depth on the sphere. The continents are displaced to their given elevation and the texture displayed over the continents corresponds to the natural earth dataset. A snapshot of the animation looks like:

Mixed Layer Depth.

Download

The provided animation can be found in YouTube. Otherwise, you can directly donwload the mov file or the mp4 file.

Note

The provided animation has been edited to invert the colormap legends and replace the date format from a string to a clock-like calendar.

Reproduce Animation

To reproduce the animation, make sure to install Blender and BlenderNC by following the instructions at Install Blender in VDI, and download this animation access_mld.blend file by clicking here.

After downloading the blender file and opening it in VDI or your rendering computer of preference, make sure to reconnect the BlenderNC nodes by following the instruction below:

  1. Navigate to the BlenderNC nodetree:

  2. Disconnect the output of the input node to update the nodetree:

  3. Select the mld variable:

  4. Connect all the nodes in order:

  5. Render image:

Now you can modify the animation: anything from the lighting, the material, colorbar, to the dataset used for the animation.