This report updates the status of Unidata's IDV development efforts
since the
last
report (October, 2010).
Objectives:
In the
Unidata 2013 proposal, IDV development was defined
under the proposed thematic area 3, "Developing and deploying useful
tools". The following goals were outlined in this area:
- Ability to access and visualize every data stream provided by Unidata.
- Support for analysis and visualization of ensemble model output
(e.g., probabilistic threat and multivariate probabilities, mean-spread
analysis, spaghetti diagrams, and aggregated remote access to large
ensemble archives).
- Improved handling of sub-minute data (lightning and model) as well
as long range climate data.
- Support for field project operations and datasets.
- Adaptation to GIS frameworks and integration of GIS data.
- Enhancements to the IDV framework and plug-in capabilities for
a range of customized applications (e.g., lightweight IDV for use in
educational settings).
The numbers are not in order of priority, but are used to indicate steps
toward that goal in this report.
Progress since last report:
- IDV version 2.9 was initially released on May 27, 2010, and
three updates have since been released. The latest update can be
downloaded at
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/downloads/idv/.
Some of the new features in this release include:
- IDV Java Web Start updated DigiCert certificates (Goal 1)
- Additional Jython function (Goal 6)
- Support for the CDM trajectory data type (Goal 1)
- Support for Dual Pole NEXRAD dataset (Goal 1)
- Support for the lightning data type: NLDN and USPLN (Goal 1)
- Additional GEMPAK diagnostic functions (PVOR, RELH, SM5S, SM9S, GWFS, SAVG/SAVS)
- Adding new date formatting to the data probe time series chart
See the
IDV 2.9u4 Release Notes, for more information.
- The IDV team is collaborating with the Geopod project
at the Millersville University of Pennsylvania to make certain modifications of the IDV setting
and plugins to allow them to add new functions in the Geopod plugin.
(Goal 6)
- The IDV team is collaborating with the Australian ocean data network (AODN) based
at the University of Tasmania to apply netCDF/CF convention to define the ocean glider trajectories,
store datasets in the RAMADDA repository, and display datasets in the IDV.
(Goal 6)
- The IDV team is experimenting the Github as a new public repositories for the IDV project, exploring the best way to collaborate with external developers.
- The IDV and THREDDS/netCDF-Java teams are collaborating on the
CDM definitions of the scientific feature type of the point datasets, including trajectory,
lightning and profiler datasets. (Goal 1)
- Meetings/Presentations:
- Yuan attended the AGU fall Meeting and gave
a poster presentation on "Visualization and data sharing of COSMIC radio occultation dataset"..
- Yuan and Julien attended the 2011 Seattle AMS Meeting and presented
IDV and RAMADDA demonstrations at the Unidata booth.
New development:
Development is underway for the next release of
the IDV (2.10) which should be released in summer 2011.
Several of these features are already available for testing in the IDV nightly release.
nightly build.
- Added a capability to put a logo in the IDV plan view
- Ensemble user interface: selecting, subsetting, color by member
- Ensemble functions: average, max/min, mode, percentile, range, and standard deviation
- Contour labelling: font, size and align
- Lightning: NLDN and USPLN
- Support for GrADS data (Goal 1)
- Support for GEMPAK surface and upper air data (Goal 1)
Ongoing efforts include:
- Additional ensemble functions: multivariate probabilities, etc.
- User interface of the IDV memory control (Goal 1)
- Remote data access through netCDF remote protocol (Goal 1)
- Support for multi trajectories display uses the CDM TrajectoryFeatureType (Goal 1)
- Improved time handling to allow data selection based on existing displayed data (Goal 3)
- Continued labelling and color bars improvement work with SSEC
- Collaborating with CDM/TDS groups on improving access and display of COSMIC data (Goal 1)
- Collaborating in the development of
VisAD
and
McIDAS-V
- Keeping up with new Java interfaces and developments
- Various IDV bug fixes and enhancements.
Metrics:
IDV usage:**
The number of IDV users is increasing. During the first three months of
2011, the IDV was used an average of ~490 times
per day with more than 100 sites running the IDV 20 or more times during these months.
Top known sites are University of Wisconsin (Mc-V), millersville, ou, China, Korea, UIUC,
NCAR/RAL, EUMETSAT, and University of Wyoming.
Metrics data: Oct 1 2010 to Mar 31 2011
**When the IDV starts up interactively (i.e. not in script mode),
it accesses some resource files (e.g. Favorite Bundles list) from the
Unidata web server. The standard web server logs are used to generate
information on what sites are running the IDV.
