IDV Development Status Report

Don Murray
April 1, 2005

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

Progress since last report

The full-time IDV developer position vacated by Stu Wier in January, 2004 was filled as a half-time position by Doug Lindholm starting in January, 2005. Doug will focus on overlapping data and display capabilities needed by the IDV community in general and the LEAD project for which he works the other half time.

Two new beta releases of the IDV (1.2b1 and 1.2b2) were made available in December and March. The IDV can be downloaded at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/.
New features added in these releases:
- New toolbar
- New preferences for date and probe readout formats
- New display window configurations
- Improved Favorite Bundles Management
- New menu layout for Display Controls
- New Drawing Control
- Support for vectors of u,v and w components
- Improved point data (station model) layout editor
- Improved point data plot control
- Color Table range keyboard control
- New system formulas
- Better support for point text data
- New location indicator
- Background image/WMS display
- World Wind location display
- State feature based locations
- Improved Location Display features
- U.S. Census Tiger Shape file access
- Improved Shapefile display
- Improved Data Probe
- New Audio Display
- Access to Weather Web Cam data
- More predefined map projections
- Position map by address
- Undo/Redo of viewpoint and projection changes
- New underlying netCDF Java package
- GRIB and GRIB2 files can now be read in directly
- Better support for netCDF Radar Sweepfiles
- Preliminary work for aborting loads.
- Support for printing a display
- QuickTime Movie Capture improvements
- Full screen mode
- Memory usage decreased
A significant portion of development time for the 1.2b2 release was spent integrating the new NetCDF for Java 2.2 API which includes the Common Data Model (CDM). This new version of netCDF should make it easier to incorporate new data from local disk and remote servers.

Presentations on the IDV capabilities have been made at the following venues:
- Chuck Meertens from UNAVCO presented a poster at the AGU meeting in December, 2004 on using IDV for the GEON project. Don Murray provided demos of the IDV in the Unidata booth at the same conference.
- Jeff McWhirter provided demos of the IDV in the Unidata booth at the AMS Annual Meeting in San Diego, January 11-13, 2005.
- Don Murray presented a talk and demo on the IDV at the GEON Visualization Workshop (March 1-2, 2005) at the San Diego SuperComputing Center (SDSC)
- Don Murray provided demos of the IDV at the 30th Annual Northeast Storm Conference in Burlington, VT, March 18-20, 2005.

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

The IDV Steering Committee held a teleconference on February 10, 2005. It was the first gathering of the newly formed group. Mike Voss has replaced Gary Lackman on the committee. Each member was asked to bring their top 3 priorities for future IDV development. 19 separate issues were identified and the committee is in the process of a group priority. These priorities will be used by the IDV developer as a focus to their development over the next 3-6 months.

SSEC has decided to seek funding to support the development of the next generation of McIDAS, dubbed McIDAS-V. This is a multi-year effort with an extimated cost of $1.3M+. The proposed implementation will leverage off the VisAD and IDV libraries, it will be freely available. Since McIDAS sites currently have an investment of more than 1M lines of "legacy" Fortran and C code, the development will evolve, starting with a bridge between the existing MciDAS display and a VisAD-based, georeferenced display. The ultimate goal proposed is to completely replace the existing McIDAS-X with McIDAS-V. To this end, SSEC believes that a continued, strong collaboration with Unidata is essential to both organizations, and will continue to foster this relationship.
The IDV was used in the Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean Experiment (RICO) December, 2004- January, 2005. Jeff McWhirter spent a week on site setting up the IDV for accessing the real-time high resolution satellite data, S-Pol radar data, aircraft track/state data from the three aircraft and Mobile GLASS soundings. Don Murray was on-site in January for the student run portion. IDV use in RICO was a benefit to the users and the developers. Further improvements are being made to support the use of IDV in post-field project analysis.

New development

Development and testing is underway for the non-beta IDV 1.2 which will be released in time for the IDV User Training Workshops in late July/early August. New features will be influenced by the priorities set by the steering committee, but may include:

More use of the Netcdf for Java CDM to provide better access to Level II and III radar data, trajectories (aircraft tracks, drifting buoys) and point data (e.g., surface, earthquake, lightning).
Better support for WRF output and other staggered grids