Visualization and enabling technologies

The Visualization and Enabling Technologies Section (VETS), now in its third year of existence, is a dynamic and growing program within SCD. It is focused on knowledge development, the primarily post-computational phase where data moves to information, discovery, and communication. Our program includes research, development, deployment, and state-of-the-art facilities and spans the realms of large-scale data analysis and visualization, web environments and infrastructure, collaborative environments and collaboratories, Grid technology, and education and outreach.

VETS has grown by over 50% in the last year, now has a staff of 18, and will continue to grow in FY2003. This was a year of progress on many fronts. We moved our new Visualization Lab and AccessGrid into a fully operational mode, and its popularity, usage, and impact greatly exceeded our initial high expectations. NCL capabilities were dramatically expanded particularly relative to the new release of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). We made substantial progress in advancing the DOE-sponsored Earth System Grid project, engaged in collaborative work with the Unidata-led THREDDS project, and moved our NSF-funded VGEE project into its final phase. This year we played the lead role in the development of another iteration of the Knowledge Environment for the Geosciences (KEG) proposal to NSF's ITR program and contributed to quite a number of other proposals as well.

We also began work on NCAR Strategic Initiatives in the area of web-based data provision and next-generation web environments, and through the efforts of the Web Engineering Group (WEG) further expanded our core hardware and software information technology for all of UCAR. VETS staff engaged in a broad portfolio of collaborative interactions with people and projects at NCAR and other organizations. We also continued our tradition of maintaining a high level of visibility at both conferences and via a huge number of internal events. In the pages that follow, we briefly summarize our progress in providing facilities for analysis, visualization, and collaboration.

NCAR's new Visualization Lab

SCD officially opened the doors to its new Visualization Lab in October 2001. The new facility, a state-of-the-art scientific workspace, combines powerful visualization computing platforms, an AccessGrid collaboration environment, high-bandwidth networking, flexible system switching, and a large format, high-resolution stereo 3D display system to provide an unprecedented environment for remote collaboration and large-scale data exploration.

Since its opening at the start of FY2002, the heavily subscribed lab has proven to be a focal point for NCAR science, hosting a plethora of scientific workshops, symposia, and collaborative research activities. We have supported and participated in several dozen AccessGrid events including testimony sessions for the NSF Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, weekly DOE/NSF Earth System Grid meetings, CCSM software engineering group meetings, Global Science and Technology Week events, multi-agency Grid Coordination meetings, SC Global, a Solar-Terrestrial Physics workshop, the NCAR Advisory Board, meetings with NSF, and the UCAR Board of Trustees event -- just to cite a few. This new resource has enabled us to ramp up our community interactions in a remarkable way, while at the same time reducing travel burdens in cost and time. There are intangible benefits as well: NCAR is an active and visible player "on the Grid" and we're positioned to proliferate the technology throughout our organization and into the community. To this end, we have worked with NCAR and UCAR management to secure additional funding for another AccessGrid node and support staff so that these popular capabilities can be used at our other campuses.

Our initial design of the new lab ended up being remarkably effective, particularly considering the incredible complexity of the overall system. Nonetheless, we decided to make some significant incremental upgrades this year, primarily in the system switching capacity and topology, audio systems, control capabilities and user interface, and stereo projection mechanisms. Bids were solicited and a contract was awarded to effect these improvements, and the contracted work was nearing completion at the end of FY2002. We also expanded our Storage Area Network (SAN) by 2.8 Terabytes, bringing the total capacity of shared, high-performance storage available for visualization and data analysis up to 3.5 TeraBytes. In collaboration with NCAR's Geophysical Turbulence Program (GTP), VETS deployed an additional 1.3 TB of SAN storage, dedicated for GTP analysis and post-processing functions.

VETS deployed its first commodity-component-based visualization cluster this year. The storm cluster, a two-node, four-processor system with a Myrinet 2000 interconnect provides an environment to experiment with commodity hardware components (e.g. graphics cards, CPUs, and main boards), as well as an environment for scalable, parallel rendering. The distributed rendering middleware for the cluster will be the Chromium software system. We acquired, assembled and integrated the system into our existing computing infrastructure this year and plan to conduct experiments with it in FY2003.

Last, VETS made some significant inroads toward deploying a collaborative remote rendering environment in the upcoming year. Following an extensive evaluation period, SCD acquired an SGI Onyx 3800 to be dedicated to a remote visualization pilot project. The software for the pilot project will be SGI's VizServer, which supports distributed rendering as well as collaborative operation. The new system will leverage our investment in Storage Area Networking technology nicely, allowing very large datasets to be centralized while collaborators, who may be geographically dispersed, are permitted interactive visualization over a LAN or possibly a WAN. SGI refers to this as Visual Area Networking (VAN), and it is an important strategic step toward expanding the "virtual walls" of our facility.

Community software for data analysis and visualization

NCAR Graphics continues to be used by thousands of researchers in the geosciences community, as indicated by the high number of downloads on the software's website. The package provides software libraries that support a wide variety of graphing and visualization functions, with extensive and robust mapping capabilities. Use of the NCAR Command Language (NCL), a scripting language that provides data analysis in addition to scientific visualization, continues to grow in the same community, based on the increased number of software downloads and the wide variety of users accessing NCL's various websites. NCL's graphics are based on NCAR Graphics, and thus provide the same superb, publication-quality graphics that are as good or better than anything available from any toolset, including commercial applications.

In FY2002, the mapping capabilities of NCAR Graphics and NCL were extended to include access to a very-high-resolution coastline database called the "Regionally Accessible Nested Global Shorelines" (RANGS), developed by Rainer Feistel from Wessel and Smith's "Global Self-consistent Hierarchical High-resolution Shoreline" (GSHHS) dataset. The data came from the public-domain datasets "World Databank II" (WDBII) and "World Vector Shoreline" (WVS), but Wessel and Smith cleaned up the data greatly, and Feistel added structure to the data.

The ability to automatically generate nice latitude and longitude labels for many of the rectangular map projections was another frequently requested and popular feature added to the mapping capabilities of our software.

As climate models continue to generate more complex and higher-resolution grids, the developers of NCL and NCAR Graphics have started to add support for some of these unique 2D grids. One such grid is the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) grid which was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and incorporated in the Community Climate System Model. Other grids that will be added in the future include the ORCA grid and spherical geodesic grids. In conjunction with support for unique 2D grids, work was completed to provide a new contour rasterization algorithm, allowing users to contour their data using a cell-center method, instead of just a cell-boundary method.

Over 30 new data processing functions and procedures were added to NCL. Some of these functions provide the capability to:

• Calculate various parameters of the binomial, chi-square, gamma, and normal distributions
• Estimate and remove the least-squares quadratic trend at all grid points
• Interpolate a vertical column from sigma coordinates to hybrid coordinates
• Calculate the dew point temperature given temperature and relative humidity
• Calculate the pressure of the lifting condensation level
• Calculate the mixing ratio or specific humidity given pressure, temperature, and relative humidity
• Interpolate from a grid produced by the Regional Climate Model to user-specified locations
• Plot station model data

In addition to new functions, many existing functions were enhanced to allow for more generality in the size and type of data coming in, and to allow for missing values. Many plotting functions were enhanced to incorporate the new 2D grid contour and vector capabilities, to generate special Lambert Conformal plots, and to provide users with more plotting options in general. The histogram-plotting utility was greatly enhanced to allow for more binning options and to produce nicer-looking plots.

NCL was ported to new operating systems as they became available. Two of the more popular systems include Microsoft Windows (running Cygwin) and MacOSX. The Cygwin port has provided especially useful as it allows users to run NCL from their Windows laptop systems. We also began the process of exploring strategies for layering a Python interface on top of the core NCL functionality.

The graphics below show some of the new capabilities added in FY2002, including the high-resolution coastlines, longitude/latitude labels, special Lambert Conformal grids, 2D POP grids, and enhancements to bar charts.

SCD has continued to distribute NCAR Graphics as Open Source under the GNU Public License, and the NCAR Command Language (NCL) as "Open Binary" under a special license. Open Source is still planned for NCL in the near future. From the period October 1, 2001 to September 30, 2002, there were 1,533 accesses to the NCL download website, with an estimated 800 of these being unique downloads For the same period, there were 7,795 accesses to the NCAR Graphics download site, with an estimated 1,800 of these being unique. NCL is now running on all major operating systems, with MS Windows (running Cygwin) and MacOSX being the latest operating systems added.

We continue to work with NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics division to add new functionality to NCL for the Community Climate System Model and for the scientific community. Since February 2001, CGD (with consulting help from SCD) has offered 12 hands-on workshops on NCL, with a total of 122 people in attendance.

We worked indirectly with the Naval Research Lab to get their model and observational data plotted. This involved adding new functionality in NCL to do curly vectors, high-resolution coastlines, and automatic generation of special map tickmarks on many different map projections. We have started to help NCAR's High Altitude Observatory division in laying the groundwork for using NCL as a post-processor for the Thermospheric General Circulation Model (TGCM). Other major new features in NCL include recognition for curvilinear grids and enhanced support for HDF-EOS (version 4) files and GRIB files.

In determining the impact on users, it is helpful to look at the number of unique visits (not just number of hits) that the CSM Graphics Tutorial website (which is all based on NCL scripts) has received in the period February 2001 to September 2002. There were at least 13 foreign countries that visited the site 100 times or more. There were at least 19 North American universities that visited the site more than 100 times, with numbers going up into the 1,400s for some individual universities. The general trend shows an increasing number of visits every month with an average of 3,000 visits a month from May 2002 to September 2002. Locally, there have been about 2,000 visits to the site from February 2001 to September 2002.

NCAR version of Vis5D

NCAR enhancements to Vis5D, a free OpenGL-based volumetric visualization program for scientific datasets in 3+ dimensions, were formally merged into an Open Source community effort called Vis5D+ in FY2002. The Vis5D+ release version 1.2.0 includes the following technology enhancements and modifications developed by NCAR:

• Support for stereo display mode (requires hardware support and proper configuration)
• Support for scene output to VRML format
• Improved screen capture
• Improved isosurface rendering using decimated, compressed meshes

Free download of this software and documentation are available through SourceForge, an Open Source software development site.

Gvolsh

Gvolsh is an interactive direct volume renderer that permits navigation through time and space of high-resolution, regular-gridded, scalar datasets. Gvolsh provides hooks to facilitate interaction with other data analysis tools such as the popular IDL. When combined with a data manipulation language like IDL, a powerful discovery and analysis environment is provided. In FY2002, a number of new rendering engines were added to take advantage of the advances in ubiquitous hardware texture mapping. Furthermore, the tool was adapted to exploit our new wavelet-based multiresolution data-organization strategy, thus permitting interactive browsing of gigavoxel datasets on even a lowly PC.

Enterprise web services

The UCAR Information Technology Council is in the process of defining the mission of the Web Engineering Group (WEG), which is housed inside SCD/VETS. The current Draft Mission Statement is: "The Mission of the Web Engineering Group (WEG) is to provide first-class World Wide Web services and infrastructure for the benefit of all of UCAR/NCAR/UOP. The set of services and infrastructure to be provided will be identified by the Web Advisory Group (WAG) through its UCAR-wide cooperative efforts and expressed in the WAG Strategic Plan." Progress in addressing this charter accelerated nicely throughout the year with new staff additions and heightened interaction between WEG and WAG.

Web facilities

The UCAR Web Engineering Group (WEG) operates a three-tiered complex of computational platforms as a shared facility for supporting and presenting UCAR's web presence. The architecture emphasizes extensibility along with high performance and high reliability. In FY2002, increases in demand on the central web cluster outstripped the performance envelope of the clustered Linux system that provided the first-tier services. For this reason, we replaced the Linux systems with Sun Netras, which are thin rack-mounted servers that function seamlessly with the larger back-end Sun servers and offer excellent cost/performance. A cluster of six such systems now forms the backbone of web services. The following diagram depicts our current configuration with planned future additions highlighted with red text.

The front tier is a high-availability cluster of Sun Netra servers running distributed, load-balanced web server software. This provides an easily scalable cluster that appears to be one server to the outside world. The web.ucar.edu system provides a place for content creators and managers to work, and provides remote access to the content. This provides direct and remote access to the content deployed on the front-tier cluster. Behind these clusters are the distributed file services and application services. Each is again a Sun cluster to provide for high availability.

This web usage summary shows a cyclical load on the UCAR web servers. The lowest levels of activity coincide with the summer months when students are out of school.

Our plans for FY2003 and beyond include the addition of servers and expanded storage to account for the growing demands and aging hardware. We anticipate growth in FY2003 in storage requirements for projects in the NCAR Strategic Plan and Strategic Initiatives, Web Advisory Group priorities, education and outreach efforts, and collaborative work in portal development. A discussion is under way to host more Division and Program web content on WEG servers.

Tools and services

Addressing the Web Advisory Group (WAG) strategic plan, WEG developed and maintained a prioritized list of projects and tasks and made significant progress on expanding and improving UCAR's web environment on several fronts.

The UCAR-wide web authentication security service is a cornerstone of WEG's provisions. This facility was documented in the interest of maintainability and as part of making the service useful and readily deployable for other groups within UCAR. An improved interface to web statistics was installed. The Sawmill software underwent testing by a focus group and proved to provide the richness of capabilities that people had been seeking.

WEG began providing a fundamentally new service for developers who work in Java Server Pages (JSPs) and the associated technologies. The Tomcat server runs on a cluster of two Sun enterprise servers. Developers will be able to deploy sophisticated dynamic websites using this technology. Web-based access to electronic mail was the first application installed in the Tomcat environment. This Java-based server program provides everyone who has a UCAR mail account with secure access to their mail when they cannot use the normal methods. The typical scenario in which it will be most useful is when a staff member is on business travel and does not have their own computer; by visiting a cyber-cafe, they can connect via a web browser to the UCAR webmail server and thereby read and send mail, with attachments. The figure below shows the appearance of the login screen of this application.

Streaming media services have been addressed by installing the Real Networks Helix streaming server software. Running on a cluster of two Sun enterprise servers, this service will stream content from the UCAR web to anyone on the planet. Streaming movie creators now have a way to serve the content they create. The software streams Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media formats, which provides a high level of interoperability for most of the browsers used by our community.

WEG continues to research a number of promising technologies for future applications. An important area of investigation is Content Management Systems (CMSs). This would provide a consistent back-end interface to the content managed under the web cluster. Content creators would have access to information through remote authoring protocols. Web administrators would have control over access to the content, which would be delegated to managers and content creators. Managers would have access to workflow procedures, so that creating content undergoes a well-defined process from beginning to end.

WEG is also investigating a bibliographical database solution, so that researchers could share and access a central repository of bibliographical references while they are writing for publication. WEG will also add a group calendaring solution to its menu of modular options to deploy for website creators. Collaborators working within a group will be able to share the calendar to aid in their work.

Outreach, advocacy, and community building

We have also been engaged in the important task of identifying synergies and building community to improve UCAR's efficiency of operation and collaborative work among developers and content providers across the organization. One way in which we have improved collaboration between people within UCAR working in web development fields (web engineering, design, and authoring) was to create a number of mailing lists. These lists have proven to be a valuable way for people to communicate, as each list has gained 30-50 members through a self-subscription approach. We have also developed a new WEG website that provides documentation, access to information about what WEG is working on, and a way to discuss services, recommend future services, and request help with existing services. WEG staff have established dialog with various divisions and programs that could enhance operational effectiveness and efficiency by using the shared resources that are available. Discussions of Division and Program needs for web access to electronic mail is just one example of this dialog.

Building the NCAR Collaboratory

The Earth System Grid II

During FY2002 we began work on the newly awarded DOE-sponsored Earth System Grid II project with our DOE, university, and NCAR collaborators. The project is focused on building a DataGrid for climate research that facilitates management and access to climate model data across high-performance broadband networks. It builds on one of the more exciting recent developments in computational science, Grid Technologies and the Data Grid. The Data Grid is a next-generation framework for distributed data access in the high-performance computing arena, and it addresses security, transport, cataloging, replica management, and access to secondary storage. We successfully demonstrated the results of this work at the SC2001 conference and established NCAR as a node on the Data Grid. Over the course of the year, we developed a remarkable level of linkage and collaboration with a number of programs that span the globe. These include the Unidata-led THREDDS project, NOAA's NOMADS project, and the U.K. e-Science program. This activity speaks directly to our NSF review recommendations and our own contribution to the rapidly expanding Global Grid effort.

The Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment (VGEE)

Work continued on the NSF-funded Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment project, and functionality for plan views, vertical cross sections, 2D data slices, and color control for all objects were added to expand the visualization tool's capabilities. Also, in a major redesign, the VGEE software base was migrated to Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) framework in collaboration with the Unidata Metapps developers. This enhancement opened the door for access to the rich set of IDV library functions for visualizing and analyzing geoscience data.

As a feasibility test, the new IDV-VGEE version along with new datasets were released and integrated into the curriculum at West Chester University in Pennsylvania by Professor Rajul Pandya in an undergraduate geoscience course. Results of this experiment and preliminary conclusions were promising. In an end-of-course analysis, VGEE users said that the class contributed to their ability to perform logical analysis, and these students also showed more improvement in test scores than a control group that did not use the VGEE utility.

Strategic Initiatives: The Community Data Portal (CDP) and World Class Web

We have made substantial progress over the past year with our Strategic Initiatives aimed at advancing in areas of Information Technology and focused efforts in the area of managing and sharing data and the development of next-generation web environments. The Community Data Portal (CDP), in particular, has attracted a large amount of additional interest, and at this point, we are certain that we have a special project underway with exceptional opportunities. Progress in the next-generation web area has been advancing as well, and we have found that these two activities complement each other nicely.

The NCAR Community Data Portal

VETS' FY2002 accomplishments on this project include:

• Established the Community Data Portal system and site, dataportal.ucar.edu, with SCD cosponsoring this thrust with over $100K of computational and data-storage resources (new Sunfire server, dataportal.ucar.edu) along with system administration services.
• Engaged in pilot project work with ACACIA/ARCAS (CGD) on climate assessment, SCD/DSS on reanalysis data, HAO on TIME-GCM data, VEMAP, and CGD on "eViewers."
• Worked with the CCSM project to release CCSM V2 dataset to the research community.
• Collaborated with the Biogeosciences Initiative to develop the CDAS data site.
• Worked with COLA to establish the DODS/GRADS remote data analysis system.
• Collaborated with GTP to develop an ITR proposal for providing next-generation data services for turbulence research.
• Cultivated collaborative partnership with the NOAA NOMADS program and the Earth System Grid (ESG).
• Coupled dataportal.ucar.edu to the large storage systems on the IBM SP system Data Analysis and Visualization Engine (DAVE) for climate data publication.
• Effectively served as an implementation project for elements of the UCAR Data Management Working Group (DMWG) strategic plan.
• Jointly developed dataportal sections of "Windows to Climate" proposal with ESIG and E&O.
• Played the lead role in the joint development of metadata, catalog, and knowledge representation strategies with the Data Management Working Group. This work is hoped to span data, media, and general information.

The following image is a protoype web-based portal that provides access to a number of datasets coming from different providers.

A world-class web presence for NCAR

The SCD Initiatives website was launched in September 2002 and showcases the progress of SCD across the four information technology initiatives in the NCAR Strategic Plan. In addition, the VETS internal and public websites, which are undergoing final testing, have been completely redesigned using best practices approaches such as audience analysis, site strategy, wireframe interfaces, design comps, and template-based page development. All three websites sport a new visual look that raises the design standard for NCAR websites.

WEG's beta implementation of a new streaming video server is a significant enhancement to our infrastructure, enabling users to start viewing multi-megabyte scientific animations within seconds instead of waiting for an entire movie to download. With these processes and infrastructure in place, we can now move our attention to the larger NCAR web presence. The following summarizes VETS' FY2002 accomplishments in these areas:

Web presence for IT-related strategic initiatives

• Developed a new web presence that documents the array of activities described here along with links to related projects.

Develop a digital media gallery for earth system science

• Collaborated with WEG to configure and evaluate streaming media services and began the process of integrating media-cataloging capabilities with web interfaces to the content.
• Developed plans with NCAR Education and Outreach to analyze and assess opportunities to leverage our suite of scientific animation for the Windows to the Universe (W2U) project.

Toward a thematic and Semantic web

• Leveraged the work with catalogs in the CDP thrust to extend to the digital media activity with a long-term goal of providing media-specific (e.g. data, animation, imagery) search capability and ultimately semantic search capabilities.
• Began development of a new thematic website for collaborative science/visualization projects.

It is impossible to capture the breadth of work accomplished, so we have prepared a website that exposes progress across our thrust areas. It serves dual roles: to demonstrate coupled progress on our activities and to serve as an information source on our directions both internally and to the broader external community.

Chromium

In collaboration with Stanford University and the DOE, we continued investigating Chromium, the Open Source, distributed, parallel rendering middleware. Chromium has been deployed on our newly acquired cluster, and in FY2002 we began learning how to use the software and succeeded in porting a couple of applications, including the widely used Vis5D package.

A Knowledge Environment for the Geosciences (KEG)

KEG is a vision for an integrated knowledge environment that seamlessly connects a federation of tools, portals, and collaboratories created and used by motivated individuals, projects, and organizations around the world. Our research agenda spans knowledge representation and engineering, large-scale component frameworks, collaboration environments, analysis and visualization capabilities, data strategies, data mining, and the new concept of Knowledge Grids -- bodies of cooperating IT groups that provide distributed, discipline-centric services.

While KEG has not yet been funded, pieces of its vision are being accomplished through other integrations of the Community Data Portal and the Earth System Grid.

Next-generation analysis and visualization software

Our current generation of analysis and visualization tools is approaching end-of-life relative to many of today's problems and most of tomorrow's. Rather than continue to incrementally bandage existing software codes, a modern framework is required to facilitate the development of new applications that can cope with data volume (1-10 TB and more) and complexity, collaborative capabilities (e.g. AG), and efficient integration of the most promising new developments from computer science. During FY2002, we began the process of defining a new project that would address this important area. A proposal was prepared and submitted as an NCAR Strategic Initiative entitled "Frameworks and Applications for Terascale Data Analysis and Visualization," and VETS staff began meeting to discuss our future work in this area. This proposed new effort will build upon our own long-term work in data analysis and visualization software (i.e. NCL, Vis5D, volume rendering, etc.), a variety of emerging community efforts by DOE, NSF, and university researchers, and our own collaborative research efforts. While the effort is not funded yet, we intend to pursue it aggressively in FY2003. In the meantime, we have been conducting exploratory research work in a variety of areas.

A whitepaper was authored on developing multi-resolution capabilities for large-scale volume visualization with an emphasis on turbulence-simulation data. In the software realm, VETS staff experimented with Python, an object-oriented scripting language that has excellent capabilities for integrating legacy and extant software. Python's popularity is growing rapidly in the scientific community, and it's a strong candidate as an integrating layer for next-generation capabilities. We also began to explore the functionality and performance offered by Java, Java3D, and VisAD in the context of the Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment (discussed under Research in the VETS report).

Time-varying volume rendering

One of the challenges most ignored in scientific visualization research is the efficient handling of time-varying datasets. These pose numerous bandwidth challenges throughout the visualization pipeline. Numerical simulations in the earth sciences datasets are dominated by such time-varying data. VETS, in partnership with researchers at U.C. Davis, devised a new method for accelerating the rendering of time-varying data volumes using commodity graphics cards. The algorithm employs the advanced texture mapping capabilities provided by many of today's consumer graphics cards to decode a temporally compressed data stream in hardware. The results that were achieved on a low-end PC were previously attainable only on high-end visual supercomputers. An invited paper describing a parallel implementation of the algorithm running on a Lintel cluster was published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Novel data organization strategies

Similar to the problems associated with large temporal datasets are the difficulties arising from data having high spatial resolutions. In FY2002 we began researching novel, multi-resolution data organization strategies based on wavelet transformations that permit rapid extraction of data subregions at adaptive resolutions. These wavelet-based methods are highly efficient, designed to take advantages of cache-based microprocessors and access methods of rotating storage. Our preliminary results are highly encouraging, and we hope to publish our methods in the coming year.

Collaborative efforts

VETS collaborates with many modeling efforts, research projects, and working groups in the area of advancing data management, analysis, and visualization capabilities. We also work with other organizations to jointly develop new technology, and our move to an Open Source model will accelerate such activities in the future. Staff members work directly with researchers to identify and deploy analysis and visualization solutions on a project-by-project basis, a process that not only advances the research programs but also provides valuable insights into current and future requirements. The list below summarizes collaborative efforts engaged in by one or more VETS staff members.

MM5 simulation of Hurricane Danny

Scheitlin collaborated with Wen-Chau Lee (ATD) to provide a mesoscale verification of a hurricane near landfall off the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Universal fire shape

Scheitlin and Coen (MMM) produced a series of wildfire animations using tracer (smoke) data and vertical vorticity simulations to study fire evolution and universal fire shape.

Perfect storm simulation

Scheitlin worked with Sheri Mickelson (ANL) to produce a perfect storm simulation for AMS2002.

Rotor development

Stobbs collaborated with Joachim Kuettner (JOSS) and Rolf Hertenstein to produce an NCAR Graphics animation that compares two types of rotor development in the lee of mountains, causing moderate to severe flight hazards.

Fair-weather cumulus simulation

Scheitlin produced a visualization demonstrating the cycle of fair-weather cumulus evolution over dry land in collaboration with Chin-Hoh Moeng (MMM).

Decaying turbulence

Collaborative work was continued with SCD's Rodney James and MMM's Yoshi Kimura and Jack Herring to visualize high-resolution numerical simulations of decaying turbulence.

MHD simulations

Collaborative work continued with NOAA's Dusan Odstrcil to visualize numerous new MHD simulations exploring the role of solar Coronal Mass Ejections and the ambient solar wind.

SEAM

Collaborative work with CGD's Aime Fournier revisited the simulation of the polar vortex using the newest version of the Spectral Element Atmosphere Model (SEAM), an animation of which will be shown at the keynote address for SC2002.

Ocean temperature and ice visualization

Fred Clare worked with Warren Washington, Gary Strand, and Tom Bettge (CGD) to produce an ocean temperature and sea ice depth animation. The data were generated from the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ocean model produced at Los Alamos and from a sea ice model developed jointly by Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Washington, and NCAR scientists. Both of these models are integral parts of the NCAR CCSM (Community Climate System Model).

Carbon uptake

Modern climate models take into account the growth and decay of vegetation. Using the T85 version of the NCAR Community Climate Model, Fred Clare and Warren Washington (CGD) collaborated to produce two carbon uptake animations showing the rate at which plants absorb carbon dioxide during their growth phase.

Water vapor visualization

In collaboration with Warren Washington (CGD), Fred Clare produced a visualization depicting the evolution of total vertical water vapor (precipitable water) for a one-year period. The data were produced from the T85 version of the NCAR Community Climate Model using a one-hour time step.

Warming run from the T42 PCM model

Fred Clare collaborated with Warren Washington (CGD) to produce a visualization depicting temperature anamolies out to year 2150. This animation shows warming of surface temperature in the 21st century as predicted from ensemble integrations of a coupled ocean-atmosphere CGM forced with a full range of projected concentrations of greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols. The results were produced from the PCM model at resolution 64 latitudes by 128 longitudes, and they indicate that by year 2100 there is an approximate 2.3-degree-C difference of the average global temperature from the 1950-1990 mean.

VETS education and outreach activities

VETS continued its outreach program with appearances at SC2001, CAS2002, AMS2002, SIGGRAPH2002, and VETS supported the normal heavy schedule of Visualization Lab presentations (59 total) to visiting researchers, students, educators, and other visiting groups. The schedule also included a large addition of interactive videoconferencing sessions (21 total + regularly scheduled weekly and monthly meetings) using the Access Grid technology.

One Access Grid event in particular involved outreach to both local and remote school kids in a presentation and discussion on wildfires as part of NCAR's participation in the Global Science and Technology Week webcast and Access Grid event. VETS coordinated NCAR's participation with several other remote sites including presentations from President Bush's Science Advisor and the Director of the National Science Foundation.

In an effort to provide the general public and school children exposure to high-end visualization and state-of-the-art scientific data exploration techniques, VETS also began implementation of a joint project with the NCAR Education and Outreach Public Visitor Program to provide visualization theater access for regular demonstrations to school children and public visitors.

Other Education and Outreach presentations in the vislab included:

• 10/23   NSF F&A visitors
• 12/05   University of Wyoming student visitors
• 02/06   Weber Elementary students
• 02/20   Louisville Middle School students
• 03/09   Ph.D. students from the University of Colorado
• 03/15   PAOS department at the University of Colorado
• 03/18   Iowa State University AMS Chapter
• 04/08   Science Fair winners
• 04/29   Global Science and Technology Week session
• 06/06   SOARS students
• 06/28   San Ildefonso Tribal Chair
• 07/22   High school teachers affiliated with R. Johnson conference

Community service activities

John Clyne served as the visualization program chair for the Cray User's Group.

Fred Clare volunteers on the NCAR Library Book Selection Committee.

Susan Cross served as a community mentor for the SOARS program.

Don Middleton served on a National Research Council Committee to develop a long-term research agenda for the NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) project. He contributed to the interagency Middleware and Grid Infrastructure Committee (MAGIC) effort to promote long-term strategies for developing a national Grid infrastructure across the various federal agencies. Middleton also served as a proposal reviewer for the U.S. Department of Energy and NOAA.

Tim Scheitlin assisted SOARS students in producing 3D visualizations of their summer projects.

VETS staff -- Don Middleton, Jeff Boote, John Clyne, Darin Oman, Joey Mendoza, and Tim Scheitlin -- provide an ongoing community service at conferences and for NCAR visitors by explaining, supporting, and demonstrating state-of-the-art scientific visualization techniques and technology in the forms of technical presentations and education and outreach presentations. They also provided interactive virtual conferencing services to the scientific community via the Vislab's function as the NCAR AccessGrid node.

Listing of VETS technical presentations and Access Grid events

Vislab technical presentations

• 10/09   UCAR Members Open House
• 10/11   Urban Planning Workshop
• 10/19   ACE Workshop
• 10/29   CU and British Petroleum visitors
• 11/11   Jim Bottom and staff
• 11/13   Walt Polansky, acting MICS Division Director
• 11/14   UCAR Management NSF Review Panel
• 11/15   SCGlobal
• 11/15   Tadashi Watanabe, NEC
• 11/16   John Taylor from Argonne
• 11/16   Director of NIST, Susan Sullivan
• 11/19   Reinhard Budich, IT Administrator and Director of Prism
• 12/06   UCAR Auditors
• 12/13   UCAR Contracts
• 01/15   GLOBE LAS demo
• 01/31   Paul Allen Foundation
• 02/01   Dave Schimel meeting
• 02/08   SCD Advisory Panel
• 02/08   StorageTek demo
• 02/21   Syskonnect's regional manager
• 02/21   NCAR Advisory Panel
• 02/22   Demo to Korean visitors
• 03/01   EPA
• 03/20   ESIG
• 04/04   CGD Geophysical Statistics Project
• 04/04   House Science Staffer demo
• 04/12   German TV interview with Mickey Glantz
• 04/19   Singapore visitors
• 04/22   John Lumsden, Director of the METSERVICE in New Zealand
• 04/24   A. Eblen, Joint Bureau of Meteorology/CSIRO HPCCC
• 05/03   BP-Amoco
• 05/09   Chinese Consulate
• 05/09   Friends of UCAR
• 05/15   Environmental journalists
• 05/17   Facilities demo
• 05/31   Washington demo to Executive Director of the National Science Board
• 06/11   THIC conference
• 06/17   Condit
• 06/20   CEDAR workshop
• 06/27   NRC Committee on Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services
• 07/09   Technical Review with David Roberts, BP Amoco
• 07/09   NOAA Admiral Lautenbacher
• 07/17   HAO VIP visitor
• 08/22   Cosmic Program
• 09/06   UCAR Auditors
• 09/19   Belgian Secretary General
• 09/25   Denver Museum visit

Access Grid events

• Weekly Earth Systems Grid meeting
• Monthly SciDAC meeting
• Multiple MAGIC Project meetings
• 10/08   UCAR Board of Trustees
• 11/30   NSF Blue ribbon panel on cyber infrastructure Access Grid (Fulker)
• 11/30   National Collaboratories investigators
• 12/05   LANL Oceanic ECO Systems
• 01/17   AG Training Session - Performance Tuning for Microprocessor-Based Systems
• 01/22   NSF Blue Ribbon Panel Testimony
• 01/24   Brown bag lunch with University of Chicago
• 02/11   CGD Meeting with DOE sites
• 02/14   CGD CCSM meeting (2 days)
• 03/07   Web100 meeting
• 03/26   Net100 meeting
• 04/24   Bruce Loftis AG presentation from NCAR/AG to Montana
• 04/29   Global Science and Technology Week session
• 05/01   NETS AG meeting
• 05/17   Communicating Effectively over the Access Grid seminar
• 06/04   NERSC tutorial
• 09/11   Advisory Council meeting/Peter Freeman (NSF)
• 09/13   Community Authentication Service
• 09/19   NCSA/Mead workshop
• 09/20   NETS AG workshop
• 09/30   Teragrid workshop

Publications

Bramer, D.*, T. Scheitlin, R. Deardorff, D. Elliott, K.E. Hay, M. Marlino, D. Middleton, R.E. Pandya, M. Ramamurthy, M. Weingroff, and R. Wilhelmson, 2002: Using an Interactive Java-based Environment to Facilitate Visualization Comprehension. 18th International Conference on IIPS, American Meteorological Society.

Clyne, J., 2002: A Multiresolution Approach to Large Data Visualization. Proc. of CUG 2002 Workshop.

Lum, E.B.*, K.-L. Ma*, and J. Clyne, 2002: A Hardware-assisted Scalable Solution for Interactive Volume Rendering of Time-Varying Data. IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Comp. Graphics, 8, 286-301.

Lum, E.B.*, K.-L. Ma*, and J. Clyne, 2001: Texture Hardware-assisted Rendering of Time-Varying Volume Data. Proc. IEEE Visualization 2001, 263-270.

Pandya, R.E., D. Bramer*, D. Elliott, K.E. Hay, M. Marlino, D. Middleton, M. Ramamurthy, T. Scheitlin, M. Weingroff, and R. Wilhelmson, 2002: An Inquiry-based Learning Strategy from the Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment (VGEE). 11th Symposium on Education, American Meteorological Society.

Pandya, R.E., D. Bramer*, D. Elliott, K.E. Hay, L. Mallaiahgari, M. Marlino, D. Middleton, M. Ramamurthy, T. Scheitlin, M. Weingroff, R. Wilhelmson, J. Yoder*, 2002: Computer-Based Tools for Inquiry in Undergraduate Classrooms: Results from the VGEE. Innovative Strategies for Enhancing Space Science and Geoscience Education at All Levels II, American Geophysical Union, Washington, D.C.

Pouquet, A., D. Rosenberg, and J. Clyne, 2002: Computational Challenges for Global Dynamics of Fully Developed Turbulence in the Context of Geophysical Flows. Proc. Stat. Theories and Comp. Approaches to Turbulence, 3-14.