Data Analysis Services Group - March 2015

News and Accomplishments

VAPOR Project

Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu

WASP Award:


John added support for 1-byte precision integers to the WASP class library. Though not fully functional this is a necessary step toward supporting integer data types.

John also began development of a NetCDF CF data reader. The reader is necessary for supporting POP ocean data sets provided by our science partner, Frank Bryan.

John gave a CISL WIP talk on WASP.

KISTI Award:

2.x Development:


Version 2.4 of VAPOR has been released. The team completed release preparation efforts, performing regression tests and platform validation, and published version 2.4 on March 9.

Last minute, high priority bugs were also addressed:

  • Scott Fixed a memory issue in the VDCWizard that led to decreased performance (as we had sporadically observed with some WRF datasets). The problem was that new instances of wcwriter and vdfio would be spawned for each variable/timestep in a dataset. The fix was to simply re­use a single copy repeatedly.
  • Scott Fixed a problem in the VDCWizard that limits the number of timesteps to 1000 during VDC creation

We also completed migration of VAPOR website to drupal 7. Thanks to Steve Geinosky for all his efforts. Much restructuring and vetting of the web site was required after the cut over. In particular, Scott performed:

  • Gave the “Vapor Features” page a facelift
  • Updated credits
  • Modified our galleries
  • Made proposed changes to our main menu bar
  • Applied tags to all views 
  • Helped Miles finish uploading and configuring our youtube videos Several other miscellaneous restructurings

With release 2.4 out the door, work began on 2.5:

  • Scott implemented 3D contour labels). We now support billboard text, text within a plane (such as contours), and 3D text within the scene.


3.x Development:

We continue to make progress with VAPOR 3.0.  Alan made a number of improvements in the new GUI design, so that it is stable and properly supports undo/redo of renderer instance controls.  Alan also merged in all of the relevant bug fixes from the 2.4 source code, a significant undertaking that was hampered due to the shortcomings of GIT. Scott dug into Qt and experimented with various layout control options.

John began work on a NetCDF CF data reader for VDC3.


Administrative:

Education and Outreach:

John gave a CISL WIP talk on WASP.

Software Research Projects

Feature Tracking:

Climate data compression:

Production Visualization Services & Consulting

Alan has been working with Rich Rotunno (from MMM).  Rich is collaborating with George Bryan to simulate the air flow over a mountain, looking at the turbulent patterns that result.  VAPOR has several tools that help understand this flow.

Tim Scheitlin and Jonathan Vigh are working on a visualization of Hurricane Odile for the Mexican government.  Alan did some initial preparations to visualize this data in VAPOR, which should not be difficult.  However Tim wants first to use Maya to meet an April 23 deadline for an initial visualization.

NWSC2 RFP

John reviewed several drafts of the RFP technical spec.

 

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