IDV Development Status Report

Don Murray
September 12, 2005

This report updates the status of Unidata's IDV development efforts since the last report (April, 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 1.2 was released on August 12, 2005. The IDV can be downloaded at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/.
New features added in this release in the past year:
- User Interface Changes
  - New Toolbar
  - New Preferences
  - New Display Window Configurations
  - Favorite Bundles Management
  - New Menu Layout for Display Controls
- Display Changes
  - New Drawing Control
  - Support for vectors of u,v and w components
  - Improved point data (station model) layout editor
  - Improved point data plot control
  - Color Table range keyboard control
  - New Location Indicator
  - Background Image/WMS display
  - World Wind location
  - State feature based locations
  - Improved Location Display features
  - Tiger Shape file access
  - Improved Shapefile display
  - Improved Data Probe
  - New Audio Display
  - Access to Web Cam data
  - Improved Cross Section and Data Transect controls
- Maps and Projections
  - More predefined map projections
  - Position map by address
  - Undo/Redo of viewpoint and projection changes
- Data Source Changes
  - New system formulas
  - Better support for point text data
  - New underlying netCDF Java package
  - GRIB and GRIB2 files can now be read in directly
  - Better support for netCDF Radar Sweepfiles
  - Better support for netCDF Aircraft Tracks
- Other Changes
  - Preliminary work for aborting loads.
  - Support for printing a display
  - QuickTime Movie Capture
  - Full Screen Mode
  - Memory usage decreased
  - New Java/Java 3D in the InstallAnywhere Installers
- Bug Fixes
  - Various and sundry bugs were fixed
A significant portion of time spent for the 1.2 release from 1.2b2 was in updating documentation (User's Guide and Training Workshop) and continued integration of the new NetCDF for Java 2.2 API which includes the Common Data Model (CDM).

The use of IDV continues to increase. Over the period of July 5 to September 9, 2005, the IDV was used an average of 127 times per (week) day. Top known sites are University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Navy Underwater Warfare Center, ITC (Netherlands), Millersville University, NCAR/CGD, Western Michigan, San Francisco State, Unversity of North Carolina, and Valparaiso University.

Three IDV User Training workshops were held July 20-21, August 5-6 and 8-9 (UCAR only) as part of the larger Unidata User Training Workshop series. All sessions received excellent reviews.

The IDV Steering Committee provided feedback to the developers on the road to the 1.2 release. Some progress was made on the top 10 issues that the committee identified as their priorities for development. Another teleconference of the group will be held in late September or early October. Alex DeCaria from Millersville University resigned from the committee and we are looking for a replacement.

The IDV developers have been working closely with Steve Aulenbach at NCAR/CGD and Michael Burek from NCAR/SCD to improve the access to and display of field data from the ACME project. A recent Unidata CommunitE-letter article has a write-up on this collaboration.

Jeff McWhirter and Don Murray are travelling to Madison, WI September 12-14 to meet with the VisAD and McIDAS-V developers. The goal of this meeting is to discuss VisAD enhancements to improve performance in the IDV and to discuss the development of McIDAS-V using the IDV framework.

New development

Development and testing is underway for the IDV 1.3b1 which will be released in time for the AGU meeting in December. New features will be influenced by the priorities set by the steering committee, but may include:

A new graphing facility based on JFreeChart for creating time series, histograms and scatter plots. This has been applied mostly to plotting aircraft data from field projects but will be expanded to handle other types of data.

A new framework for grouping display controls and displays came out of the JFreeChart work. This allows the user to create a single pane that holds the display and several graphs and control windows. This helps mitigate the window glut that some users complain about.

Improved navigation facilities to support Google Earth-like panning and zooming.

Support for reading and displaying Google Earth KML files.

Improved aircraft trajectory displays.

The capability of associating sound (musical tones) with a display so users can "hear" their data.

Use of the Netcdf for Java CDM to provide better access to Level II and III radar data, trajectories (aircraft tracks, drifting buoys) and point data (e.g., surface, earthquake, lightning).

Better support for WRF output and other staggered grids

Performance (memory and speed) enhancements

Ongoing efforts include:

Collaborating in the development of VisAD
Keeping up with new Java interfaces and developments
Various and sundry IDV bug fixes and enhancements.

This document is maintained by Don Murray <dmurray@unidata.ucar.edu>