Clint Beharry - Portfolio

clintbeharry@gmail.com
305-775-8822
New York, NY

Weather Simulation

For my B.S. Computer Engineering senior project, I designed a weather simulation engine and interface. Due to the increase in robust virtual worlds within video games and social networks, I came up with the idea to create a random but climatically realistic weather engine. This would allow users to enter a simulated environment with unpredictable but statistically likely weather.

I chose popular American cities for the project to clearly demonstrate my results versus real weather. The user first selects parameters from a simple form.

The form inputs are submitted to a CGI Executable written in C++ where all the engine logic is handled. It first identifies the climate settings for the chosen city then randomly generates initial conditions from a range of realistic results depending on the date chosen. These random conditions are then randomly overlaid on the city's geographic tiles that have attributes of altitude, air pressure and water content. The tiles are systematically linked to one another to create flowing weather patterns. According to principles of weather formation, the results for cloud coverage, precipitation, and wind behavior are determined.

The bulk of the results are outputted to an XML file while minor visual settings are sent directly to the Flash file. The Flash file then calls the XML file and renders all results visually and audibly.

Precipitation "green" view - Subarctic climate - Nighttime scattered light snow in Anchorage, Alaska on January 2nd.

Wind Behavior "yellow" view - Tropical climate - Strong daytime winds moving in from the ocean to lower air pressure regions in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 1st.

Cloud Coverage "gray" view - Desert climate - Cool, partly cloudy night in Las Vegas, Nevada on March 2nd.

Precipitation "green" view - Subtropical climate - Daytime scattered showers in Miami, Florida on April 3rd.

The CGI Executable in C++ has specific server requirements to run correctly, the project was hosted on the University of Miami's Computer Engineering servers but have since been taken offline. Unfortunately there is no running version of the project anymore. The Flash file has dynamic audio speech output and animated weather effects. I designed a rich-media interface to show how the engine could be used for rich-media products like video games and social networks.

Project Index

	MFA Interaction Design
	Research
	Information Architecture
	Information Visualization
	Interface Design
	Identity
	Print
	HTML/CSS/Javascript
	PHP/MySQL
	Flash/Processing
	Social Impact
	Art/Experimental