The visualization of natural phenomena visualization is an important research area in computer graphics and virtual reality.In this paper we analyze and imprave the traditional ray casting algorithm by proposing a graphics processing units(GPU)based spherical shell ray casting algorithm. GPU are used in the spherical shell data field volume rendering

and spherical shell.Vertex shader and pixel shader programs for spherical shell data field rendering are designed. The format of the typhoon source data is analyzed and the typhoon volume data to be visualized is generated. The visualization of typhoon clouds and factors are implemented by using the proposed algorithm. Experiment results show that a good real-time visualization of a typhoon is obtained by the GPU-based spherical shell ray casting algorithm.