The IDV: Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer Mike Voss Department of Meteorology SJSU – Oct 11, 2006

Outline Unidata’s Role in Geosciences Education Motivation for developing the IDV Hands off introduction to the IDV Hands on IDV session

Unidata Located in Boulder, NSF funded, part of UCAR Mission “ Provide data, tools, and community leadership for enhanced earth system education” Main software and systems –netCDF, LDM/IDD, GEMPAK, McIDAS, THREDDS –and now the IDV Voss and Cordero (and the lab)

Motivation for developing the IDV Enable remote access to data 3-D visualization Data formats – netCDF, grib, grib2, text, others Platform independence - Java Leverage web services

Real-time Data Volume Issues LDM/IDD - 3 GB of real-time data per hour…and increasing Bandwidth hog, very inefficient Limits participation because you need bandwidth and expertise to handle data, both of which are expensive. Solution: build remote access into software

Remote Access to Data Remote access capability over the Internet relieves the need to distribute all the data…and lowers the barriers to entry: “democratization of data” Unidata is making this happen with IDV and THREDDS catalogs. (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services) Current software (GEMPAK) does not allow remote access to data

Introduction to the IDV Hands off demo

Disadvantages & Limitations of the IDV Different, new software to learn Can’t save data with a bundle…..yet Slow, memory hog…needs at least 1 GB of RAM Not yet ideal for meteorological analysis….has limited grid diagnostic capabilities 3D Meteorology is a new paradigm…it’s hard to overcome established methods for observation and analysis

OK, let’s try the IDV Go to a computer Start the IDV Also start a web browser and go to my web page: –(and click on the instructions) Follow instructions