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Graphics and data analysis
(formerly NCAR Graphics)

The mission of the Graphics and Data Analysis Group is to develop, maintain, and support software to aid scientists in the analysis and visualization of data.

This mission requires the group to maintain a high level of expertise in the following areas:

• Scientific graphics
• Scientific data formats and datasets
• Integration of math and computational routines with the group's products
• Scientific data processing
• Knowledge of operating systems, compilers, and programming languages
• Software engineering principles

Software developed by the Graphics and Data Analysis Group is distributed on CD-ROM, 8-mm tape, and by FTP. All of the software documentation is provided as hypertext on the World Wide Web. Hardcopy documentation, in the form of Postscript files, is also available via the web. Group staff currently maintain about 500,000 lines of C and Fortran code and 4,000 pages of hypertext documentation. The group also provides these services:

• Installation consulting to all sites for all supported systems
• Technical and usage consulting
• E-mail support via the ncarg-talk e-mail list
• Support for internal NCAR/UCAR projects using our software products (currently NCAR Graphics and the NCAR Command Language)

Graphics and Data Analysis products and product development

NCAR Graphics version 4.1.1 release

FY1999 marked the final release of the NCAR Graphics package. Beginning in January 2000, the FORTRAN utilities synonymous with the NCAR Graphics name will be released as open source code. The NCAR Command Language and the NCAR DataVision products will be the primary focus of the Graphics and Data Analysis Group, and these products will be distributed under their respective names. This will allow the group to focus on providing data access to a wider variety of data as well as expanding our robust processing environment. Version 4.1.1 provided updated binaries for the latest operating system releases as well as some new functionality.

Product enhancements

A vastly superior and expanded map database was included with release 4.1.1. The new database includes Canadian provinces, Mexican states and U.S. counties as well as very high resolution map outlines. The higher resolution map outlines were extracted from public-domain sources and painstakingly verified and converted to a form needed by the EZMAP utilities. Special software tools were developed to facilitate this process.

In FY1999, the Graphics and Data Analysis group devoted significant resources to implementing a number of new interpolation utilities. Interpolation is a very important component for processing and visualizing data. There are many algorithms that work on specific classes of data. By expanding the number of interpolation algorithms, we can now provide a very robust interpolation suite from the NCAR Command Language and NCAR DataVision. The three algorithms added to our suite this year were:

• csagrid - a cubic spline approximation package
• shgrid - 3-D general-purpose interpolation package based on Shepard's algorithm
• cssgrid - a tension spline interpolator designed specifically for interpolation of random data on a sphere

  The NCAR Command Language was significantly enhanced this year. In addition to several new functions and procedures, a new data type called "list" was added. The list type supports, among other things, the ability to link several data files together. This greatly simplifies the extraction of a single variable across many files.

  New product development - NCAR DataVision 1.0

  The final phases of development of NCAR DataVision began in FY1999. This point-and-click data processing and visualization application combines the functionality of the subroutine libraries and NCL into a single application. NCAR DataVision's GUI allows a user to browse through directories of data, select a file, view the contents of the file, select variables from the file, and plot them using a wide variety of options. There are options for shaping variables and running NCL scripts. This functionality provides a flexible, extensible, and customizable GUI that can be tailored to meet a wide variety of data analysis and publication-quality graphics requirements. As of September 1999, NCAR DataVision was being tested by a group of friendly users, and their feedback being incorporated into the product. The release of NCAR DataVision is planned for March/April 2000.

SCD/CGD collaboration

The Graphics and Data Analysis group has provided ongoing support for the development of an NCL-based Climate System Model (CSM) post processor. The number of FTEs devoted to this support is down to about 0.75. The 0.75 FTE is split among several group members. The Graphics and Data Analysis group has incorporated processing codes in NCL as NCL functions and procedures. Additional support was lent to developing generic example scripts for creating graphics that users can easily customize as well as providing supporting documentation.

Research

The group spent some time evaluating new technologies for data access and distribution.

Proposals

The GDA group collaborated on one NSF KDI proposal this year with the South West Research Institute. The proposal received good reviews but was not funded.

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