@inproceedings{GossingBeckertFischeretal.2024, author = {Gossing, Anne and Beckert, Andreas and Fischer, Christoph and Klenert, Nicolas and Natarajan, Vijay and Pacey, George and Vogt, Thorwin and Rautenhaus, Marc and Baum, Daniel}, title = {A Ridge-based Approach for Extraction and Visualization of 3D Atmospheric Fronts}, booktitle = {2024 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS)}, doi = {10.1109/VIS55277.2024.00043}, pages = {176 -- 180}, year = {2024}, abstract = {An atmospheric front is an imaginary surface that separates two distinct air masses and is commonly defined as the warm-air side of a frontal zone with high gradients of atmospheric temperature and humidity. These fronts are a widely used conceptual model in meteorology, which are often encountered in the literature as two-dimensional (2D) front lines on surface analysis charts. This paper presents a method for computing three-dimensional (3D) atmospheric fronts as surfaces that is capable of extracting continuous and well-confined features suitable for 3D visual analysis, spatio-temporal tracking, and statistical analyses. Recently developed contour-based methods for 3D front extraction rely on computing the third derivative of a moist potential temperature field. Additionally, they require the field to be smoothed to obtain continuous large-scale structures. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of an alternative method to front extraction using ridge surface computation. The proposed method requires only the sec- ond derivative of the input field and produces accurate structures even from unsmoothed data. An application of the ridge-based method to a data set corresponding to Cyclone Friederike demonstrates its benefits and utility towards visual analysis of the full 3D structure of fronts.}, language = {en} }