CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment accomplishments

Visualization and Analysis Research Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Research (VAPOR) accomplishments

The VAPOR project is an Open Source software development effort aimed at improving the ability of earth sciences researchers to analyze and interpret results from some of the largest numerical simulation outputs found in the geosciences. VAPOR is one component of a larger, NSF-ITR funded time-varying data research-and-development project whose collaborators include NCAR, The University of California at Davis, and The Ohio State University. With NCAR leading software development and our university collaborators taking the lead on research, a mutually beneficial relationship has been established: NCAR provides a steady supply of interesting research challenges to our university partners who in turn help provide solutions to some of our toughest visualization and data analysis problems.

Decades of continual advancements in microprocessor technologies have led to numerical simulations of earth sciences phenomena computed at unprecedented scales and yielding numerical outputs of extraordinary sizes. Our ability to manage, analyze, and gain insight from these simulation data has not kept pace with our ability to generate them, and for many numerical modelers the greatest challenge in the discovery process begins once the simulation has completed and the analysis process is ready to commence. The VAPOR project takes aim at the problem of large data exploration with an intelligent approach: by exploiting multiresolution data representation coupled with advanced interactive visualization and quantitative analysis capabilities, VAPOR provides a comprehensive desktop environment suitable for exploring terascale-size data sets.

Great progress was made in VAPOR's development in FY2005. Working with our university partners and with the guidance of our interdisciplinary scientific steering committee, a series of "alpha" versions of the software was developed and put into early use by the steering committee. The alpha versions of the software have been used in the exploration of a variety of data sets both by NCAR scientists and the broader UCAR university community. Some of the significant application features completed in FY2005 include:

• A robust, GUI-based desktop application framework that supports essential ease-of-use features such as session save/restore, context help, mouse-based 3D manipulation, and undo/redo capability, to name a few

• A highly flexible environment for comparative data visualization and analysis

• Integration with RSI's Interactive Data Language (IDL), providing access to IDL's rich mathematical library and array-based data manipulation capabilities

• Direct volume rendering of multiresolution data

• Facilities for time-varying data exploration

Further information on the VAPOR project appears on the VAPOR web site.

A high-resolution (1200x1200x300) simulation of the Wintertime Polar Vortex generated by LANL researchers and volume rendered on a single Linux PC using VAPOR.

Snapshot of VAPOR depicting volume rendering combined with VAPOR's new flow visualization capabilities developed in collaboration with The Ohio State University.