Visualization of 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Simulation (Maya, PDC-Utils, C++) Viz Credits: Amit Chourasia, Steve Cutchin, Mike Rossmasler Data Credits: Brad Aagaard et. al. USGS |
To better understand the distribution of shaking and damage Earthquake caused by the great earthquake of 1906, seismologists have constructed new computer models to recreate the earthquake ground motions. The USGS simulations show how the ground moved on each side of the San Andreas fault and how seismic waves radiated away from the fault to produce the shaking. The earthquake, which began two miles offshore of San Francisco, caused shaking and damage along more than 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault. Yellow to red colors indicate regions that experienced damaging shaking.
Amit was approached to create a 3d visualization from the simulated data. The data consisted of a irregular mesh of 36,000 vertices with 65,000 faces and information about velocity and displacement at each vertex. We implemented the visualization pipeline using Maya. Publication: A. Chourasia, S. M. Cutchin, B. Aagaard (2008), "Visualizing the ground motions of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake", Computers & Geosciences, Elsevier (in press.) |
March 2006 Project Webpage |