IDV Development Status Report

Don Murray
September 20, 2004

This report updates the status of Unidata's IDV development efforts since the last report.

Objectives

In the Unidata 2008 proposal, IDV development was defined under the proposed Endeavor 4 "Software to Analyze and Visualize Geoscience Data". Under this endeavor, the following goals were outlined:

Supporting analysis and visualization of local modeling efforts (e.g., WRF and MM5 output)
Incorporating new datasets and data types
Exploring new approaches to visualizing and interacting with Earth system data, focusing on novel 3-D techniques that fuse data from multiple sources
Expanding IDV capabilities to support the creation of exploration based, interactive, pedagogic materials and integration with digital libraries.
Developing collaborative tools to make effective use of shared visualizations
Developing a framework that allows end-user assembly and integration of IDV components
Adapting to GIS frameworks (OpenGIS and ISO standards), content-based data mining, and other evolving technologies

The IDV developer position vacated by Stu Wier in January, 2004 has not been filled. This has impacted the number of improvements and additions to the IDV that have been possible. The status of this position is under discussion by the Unidata Management Team in light of the lower NSF funding than requested in the 2008 proposal.

Progress since last report

In August 2004, the non-beta 1.1 release was made available to the Unidata community. The IDV can be downloaded at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/IDV/.
Features added after the 1.1 b 3 release in March 2004:
- New side legends
- More control over saving/loading in a bundle
- Favorite Bundles
- 2D gridded fields over topography
- new Sounding displays
- Support for Level II Radar files in BZIP2 format
- Support for netCDF CF 1.0 convention ocean-s dimensionless vertical coordinate.
- Revamped Formula system
- various and sundry bug fixes

Presentations on the IDV capabilities have been made at the following venues:
- Don Murray presented a talk and poster on the IDV at the DLESE Data Services Workshop in Durham, NH on May 25, 2004

The Unidata Users Committee sponsored a regional workshop which was organized by Millersville's Rich Clark and Dave Fitzgerald with assistance from Unidata Program Center staff. The workshop featured two 1/2 day workshops on using the IDV and a 1/2 day of presentations by IDV users. Exit survey comments were uniformly positive.

Two IDV User Training workshops will be held October 18-19 and November 1-2 as part of the larger Unidata User Training Workshop series. Both sessions are full or nearly full.

The IDV library is under consideratoin to be used in the next generation of McIDAS (McIDAS-V).

The IDV will be used in the upcoming Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean Experiment (RICO) next January. We will configure the IDV to support 3-dimensional real-time displays consisting of high resolution satellite data, S-Pol radar data, aircraft track/state data from the three aircraft and Mobile GLASS soundings. This will provide a unique and exciting opportunity for future scientists in the atmospheric sciences to interact with the latest analysis software in a field project setting. In addition, it will allow the software developers to get valuable feedback for future developments and for the new scientists to use the tool in advanced real-time and post-project analysis.

New development

Development and testing is underway for IDV 1.2 beta1 which will be released in time for the IDV user training workshops. New features include:

Two new toolbars for accessing frequently used features and for organizing favorite bundles (much like the personal toolbar in web browsers). Both toolbars are user customizable.

Support for WRF version 2 netCDF output.

Support for user defined formatting of lat/lon readouts.

Support for point data in text files.

New template framework allowing users to set up the properties for a particular display (i.e. 500 mb height display). This is sort of a subset of the bundling mechanism.