Visualizing Sea Surface Salinity

The Aquarius spacecraft is designed to measure global sea surface salinity. It is important to understand salinity, the amount of dissolved salts in water, because it will lead us to better understanding of the water cycle and can lead to improved climate models. Aquarius is a collaboration between NASA and the Space Agency of Argentina

This visualization celebrates over three years of successful Aquarius observations.  The range of time shown is September 2011 through September 2014.   Sea surface salinity is shown on a flat map and on a 3D rotating globe.  Data was processed in IDL, modeled in Maya, and rendered in Renderman