Rome Lab Weather Visualization Project

Project Summary:

There are two aspects of this project. The first aspect is to develop a system which will allow users to view text and two dimensional graphics of current weather data, and weather predictions. The second aspect is to develop a fully collaborative 3D visualization toolkit with the purpose to examine weather data from supercomputing codes, such as the Oklahoma Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS).

Technology Used in this project:

• A Java front end which will allow users to interactively view current/predicted weather information.
• Incorporation of Unidata software(UCAR) to allow NPAC computers to obtain weather data.
• Incorporation of Unidata McIDAS software to analyze the data, and generate images which will be used by the Java front end.
• Database technology will be used to manage the vasts amount of information that will be generated by the Unidata software.
• VRML and OpenInventor will be used for the 3D display of the supercomputing data from weather prediction codes. We are modeling our system in the spirit of VIS5D.
• We are still examining VRML 2.0 to see if this technology will work.
• We will use API's developed at NPAC to make the 3D visualization system fully collaborative.
• We are looking into the following areas in this visualization.
• Vector graphics.
• 2D surface and contour plots.
• 3D isosurfaces.
• Volumetric rendering.
• General Filters of 3D data (smoothers, extrapolators, functional transformations, etc.)
• A Java front end to the 3D visualization system.

Sample pictures

Below is a picture of our weather animator. Here we save picture files for every hour, and then play them back in this java applet animator.

Below is a picture of our Java front end to display weather information over the Syracuse region.