This visualization shows a 3D view of the Joplin tornado in Google Earth as detected from the closest NEXRAD Weather Radar site.
The NEXRAD Radar site conducts conical sweeps at increasing elevations off the ground and measures the 'reflectivity' of particles in the atmosphere. Large rain drops, hail, and in this case debris are represented as high reflectivity values and it is 'reflectivity' which we are most accustomed to seeing on television and internet weather maps. Each sweep is represented as a COLLADA model with the semi-transparent Reflectivity image draped on the model. In addition, several isosurfaces are created from the 3D reflectivity volume and represented as polygons in the KML. This visualization was created in Google Earth using data processed and exported from the NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/wct/). The Google Earth KMZ file is available from: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/wct/extra/joplin-tornado/Joplin-MO-20110522-Tornado-Event.kmz
