Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
WASP Award:
The 3.0 source tree was restructured to segregate the WASP code from the rest of VAPoR.
John also added support for integer (CDF 5/3) wavelet transforms. The integer transforms have the property that they are perfectly invertible (no loss due to floating point round-off).
KISTI Award:
John researched consumer stereo display technologies in the hope of purchasing a system to facilitate development of stereo support in vaporgui.
Scott continued working on KISTI deliverables:
Last month I created a Big Blue Marble (BBM) image for KISTI that had transparency applied to oceanic regions of the map for visualizing their ocean models. This was done by selecting regions by color and applying an alpha channel to them in a photo editor. This approach was not effective due to the variation in the oceanmap color, and would require excessive time and attention to generate properly. The alternative approach that was implemented this month was to use land and bathymetry data from an organization called GEBCO, and mask out the BBM pixels based on that.
2.X Development:
We released VAPOR 2.4.2. This was primarily a bug-fix release that addressed a couple of important bugs. However, the addition of images with transparent ocean, and a corresponding improvement in our transparency rendering, was also included This was a features requested by KISTI to use VAPOR in their planned visualization contest for this year. Fixed in 2.4.2 were:
Scott added keyboard commands to the VAPOR master branch. The scene can now be translated with the up, down, left, and right keys. It can also be moved forward/backward with +/.
3.X Development:
Alan continues to make progress with VAPOR 3.0. Alan continues to refactor the 3.0 GUI so as to simplify as much as possible the effort of adding new GUI elements. He has updated the documentation and has been organizing a set of instructions for GUI developers.
John continued to fix bugs in the new DataMgr.
Scott debugged a problem that Alan is experiencing with the TextRenderer in VAPOR3.0, that would cause the application to crash. Scott found that we are not currently calling any GL initialization commands. After calling glewInit(), the program would not crash. However the text is still not appearing after being enabled, and Alan believes that there are other initialization commands that may need to be applied.
Administrative:
Annual reviews were completed.
Education and Outreach:
Visitors:
We have been working with Niklas Roeber (visiting from DKRZ) on visualizing Icon and MPAS data in vapor. He has already succeeded visualizing several of these data sets by implementing his own DataMgr. John has been guiding Niklas on the steps necessary to integrate an ICON data reader into vapor 2.x. The data reader would resample the data on-the-fly to a regular grid.
Two SCIparCS interns also arrived: Shreya Mitapalli and Dongliang Chu. Shreya is working on evaluating several compression parameters in the VAPoR Data Collection, while Dongliang is re-factoring the vaporgui raycaster to support curvilinear grids.
Alan has been helping Shreya Mittapalli with her Windows/Python/VAPOR environment. This was a valuable exercise because we learned several shortcomings of using VAPOR with Python on Windows. We will need to fix these in the next (2.5) release this year. We eventually decided to have Shreya do her work on Linux (geyser) and it now works well for her
Feature Tracking:
Climate data compression:
Scott submitted Peter Sullivan’s LES movie to the XSEDE 2015 conference. Followed up with him to see if he still had data backed up from October and fortunately he does. He has strongly encouraged me to continue working with it. He also told me that the video got a positive review from Chris Davis, the new MMM Director.