IDV Development Status Report

Don Murray
April 3, 2006

This report updates the status of Unidata's IDV development efforts since the last report (September, 2005).

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

IDV version 1.3b1 was released on December 15, 2005. The IDV can be downloaded at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/.
New features added in this release since 1.2:
- User Interface Changes
  - New Navigation Panel
  - New DataSource Properties Widget
- Display Changes
  - New Charting Facility
  - New Multi-Display Control
  - Improved Data Probe
  - New Volume Rendering Control
  - Better Animation Controls
  - Sharing Groups
  - Better color scale handling
- Data Changes
  - Grid Subsetting
- Other Changes
  - Images can be saved to PNG and Animated GIF format.
  - Image Generation Facility
  - Significant performance enhancements
- Bug Fixes
  - Various and sundry bug fixes
The next release of the IDV (1.3 beta 2) is scheduled for release in mid-April with a full 1.3 release in June in time for the Unidata workshop in July.

Doug Lindholm was moved back to work full time on LEAD related items in October. Since January, Yuan Ho has been working part time on the IDV to integrate radar data through the Common Data Model interface for the June (1.3) release. This will provide the IDV access to local Nexrad Level II, III and DORADE format files through a common interface.

The use of IDV continues to increase. Over the period of March 5 to March 30, 2006, the IDV was used an average of 174 times per (week) day. Top known sites are University of Wisconsin, NOAA-GSD (formerly FSL), LEAD (Indiana, UIUC), Millersville University, Embry-Riddle, Western Michigan, San Francisco State.

The IDV was selected as the visualization tool for the Operations Center for the Terrain-Induced Rotors Experiment (T-REX). It is being used to plot model output, aircraft flight tracks and drop sondes, satellite imagery and field upsondes. The majority of the IDV development work since the 1.3b1 release was in support of this project and benefits the community at large. Don and Jeff each spent a week in at the Operations Center in Bishop, CA in support of the project. This effort works towards Goals 2 & 3 above. Some images can be found at:
- G5 (HIAPER) flight for IOP2 with dropsonde paths
- Quick Time Movie of G5 (HIAPER) flight for IOP2 (89 Mb)

The IDV Steering Committee is providing feedback to the developers on the road to the 1.3 release. Some progress was made on the top 10 issues that the committee identified as their priorities for development. A teleconference was held in February. Don and Jeff gave demos of the latest features thanks to the use of the USGS's WebEx installation (access provided by Rich Signell). Steve Aulenbach (NCAR) replaced Alex DeCaria's slot on the committee. Steve is actively using the IDV for plotting and planning flight tracks for field projects.

Jeff McWhirter and Don Murray travelled to Madison, WI September 12-14 to meet with the VisAD and McIDAS-V developers. The goal of this meeting was to discuss VisAD enhancements to improve performance in the IDV and to discuss the development of McIDAS-V using the IDV framework. This resulted in some changes to VisAD which amounted to significant improvements in performance for the IDV.

The WRF Portal group at NOAA/ESLR is using the IDV as part of their interface for configuration and visualizing WRF model runs. They have provided valuable feedback which has been incorporated into the IDV code to support extensibility of the framework to build custom applications. (Goal 6 above).

Since Unidata did not have it's own booth at the AGU or AMS meetings, Don and Jeff provided information and demos in the UOP booth at those meetings. A poster was presented at the AMS Education conference in Atlanta as well.

New development

Development and testing is underway for the IDV 1.3b2 which will be released in mid-April. Much of the work has been done in support of the T-REX project and influenced by the priorities set by the steering committee and include:

A new Transect (cross section) display that allows overlay of multiple parameters.
Better animation handling - users can define their own time sequences and/or decide which displays to include in the automatic animation handling.
In-display labels - users can now have labels for each display in the main window.
Better support for aircraft tracks, including time subsetting, markers, more efficient reading
Auto-update of displays - users can have automatic reload of datasets.
Reduced memory consumption for images - still too high, but better.
Better support for WRF output and other staggered grids