Three-dimensional visualization of temporal flow sequences

Flow visualization remains one of the most powerful methods of gaining insight into turbulent flow physics. Recently there have been several excellent reviews that describe some of the latest developments in the field. It is also well known among the research community that movie or video sequences of flow visualization images, because of their dynamic nature, are frequently used to study flow development. Presentation of these data as a series of successive frame-by-frame images allows some correlation of temporal information, but is generally unsatisfactory as the human eye is much more adept at determining spatial correlations within a single image. This paper describes the application of a method to generate single three-dimensional views that emphasize temporal correlations of time-evolving two-dimensional data sets (i.e. movies), thereby improve interpretation of such data.