Unidata Developer's BlogUnidata Developer's Bloghttps://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/en/feed/entries/atom2024-03-18T20:14:52-06:00Apache Rollerhttps://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/entry/visualizing-the-boundary-layer-usingVisualizing the Boundary Layer using IDV: My Unidata Internship ExperienceUnidata News2022-08-05T13:00:00-06:002022-08-05T13:00:00-06:00<div class="img_l" style="width: 150px;">
<img width="150" src="/blog_content/images/2022/20220606_hdhaliwal.jpg" alt="Hassanpreet Dhaliwal" />
<div class="caption">
Hassanpreet Dhaliwal
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p class="byline">
by
<a href="/community/internship/#2022hd">Hassanpreet Dhaliwal</a>
<br />2022 Unidata summer intern
</p>
<p>
I started my summer internship with the goals of understanding software development and
improving my coding practices to feel confident writing reproducible and sharable
code. My time at Unidata not only gave me a structure for writing
sharable pieces of software, but also helped me in exploring data manipulation and
visualization practices to their full creative extent.
</p>
<div class="img_l" style="width: 150px;">
<a class="lightbox" title="Hassanpreet Dhaliwal" href="/blog_content/images/2022/20220606_hdhaliwal.jpg">
<img width="150" src="/blog_content/images/2022/20220606_hdhaliwal.jpg" alt="Hassanpreet Dhaliwal" />
</a>
<div class="caption">
Hassanpreet Dhaliwal
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p class="byline">
by
<a href="/community/internship/#2022hd">Hassanpreet Dhaliwal</a>
<br />2022 Unidata summer intern
</p>
<p>
I started my summer internship with the goals of understanding software development and
improving my coding practices to feel confident writing reproducible and sharable
code. My time at Unidata not only gave me a structure for writing
sharable pieces of software, but also helped me in exploring data manipulation and
visualization practices to their full creative extent.
</p>
<p>
Primarily, I worked on retrieving and visualizing the planetary boundary layer (PBL)
values from trajectory sounding type data using Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer
(IDV). IDV is a Java-based, freely available 3D visualization and analysis tool
which can be used to view and analyze a rich set of geoscience data; it was created
by Unidata for the benefit of atmospheric science students, educators, researchers,
aviation, and weather forecasters. In addition to this, I also worked on developing
PBL functions in Python.
</p>
<div class="img_r" style="width: 200px;">
<a class="lightbox" title="Boundary layer information from trajectory sounding data shown in the IDV." href="/blog_content/images/2022/20220803_devblog_intern_hassan_f2a.jpg">
<img width="200" src="/blog_content/images/2022/20220803_devblog_intern_hassan_f2a.jpg" alt="Boundary Layer visualization" />
</a>
<div class="caption">
Boundary layer visualization (click to enlarge)
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p>
The boundary layer is a critical interface trading mass, energy, and momentum
between the surface and free troposphere via turbulence. It ranges from a few
hundred to thousands of meters above the ground. The real time retrieval of PBL will
greatly benefit education, weather and air quality forecasting, and the aviation
industry, especially the pilots since the physical shape of PBL can cause dramatic
changes in lift and drag of the aircraft. The PBL depths are often retrieved via
rawinsonde data in the lower atmosphere, since the high-frequency measurements to
resolve the turbulent scale are not widely available. The PBL retrieved through the
temperature gradient method (TGRD) is often marked with a potential temperature
inversion (Θ) and moisture lapse (q). It can also be identified as the top of
turbulence adjacent to the surface and found using the critical bulk Richardson number
(<em>Ri</em>).
</p>
<div class="img_l" style="width: 200px;">
<a class="lightbox" title="PBL depth denoted by red line for a trajectory profile via TGRD method on (<em>left</em>) potential temperature vs altitude profile and (<em>right</em>) potential temperature gradient vs altitude profile. (From: NASA DISCOVER-TX-2013 P3-B-RF-09 Spiral #6)" href="/blog_content/images/2022/20220803_devblog_intern_hassan_f1a.jpg">
<img width="200" src="/blog_content/images/2022/20220803_devblog_intern_hassan_f1a.jpg" alt="PBL depth"/>
</a>
<div class="caption">
PBL depth
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p>
To create these visualizations, I devised code in Python that takes a pandas
dataframe of any sounding type data, <em>i.e.</em>, the vertical profile of
atmospheric variables. Using all the required parameters like potential temperature
and altitude for the TGRD method, and additional wind magnitude and direction information
for <em>Ri</em> yields the height of PBL as per the boundary layer physics.
</p>
<p>
While developing PBL retrieval functions, I learned a lot about writing clean and
concise code with descriptions. My mentors at Unidata were always available when I
got stuck at an error and helped me improve my coding practices with detailed code
reviews. The brainstorming sessions on the subtleties and limitations of analyzing
and visualizing different kinds of data like the gridded and trajectory datasets,
along with acquiring specific meteorological data, helped me gain some of the most
important skills I acquired over this summer. I spent a large chunk of my time
figuring out different services like the AWS, <code>ncdump</code>, Dask,
<em>etc.</em> and learned how to work with large number of netCDF files.
</p>
<p>
From the weekly professional development workshops, to trekking in Boulder's
<a href="https://www.bouldercoloradousa.com/things-to-do/insider-guides/flatirons/">Flatirons</a>,
to learning productive lifelong skills as an atmospheric scientist, I had
a lot of fun spending my summer in Boulder and working with Unidata. I did a lot of
of things these past two months. Some of them ended up in my internship deliverables
while others helped me understand where to look for the requisite data and how to
make my research practices more efficient. To sum up my summer at UCAR, the journey
has been at least as educational as reaching the destination.
</p>
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/entry/a-summer-of-code-andA Summer of Code and Outreach:<br />Have you heard of the Integrated Data Viewer?Unidata News2019-08-16T10:40:16-06:002020-07-30T11:02:35-06:00<div class="img_l" style="width: 125px;padding-bottom:0;margin-bottom:0;
">
<img width="125" src="/blog_content/images/2019/20190611_jwiedemeier_1_400.jpg" alt="Jessica Blunt" />
<div class="caption">
Jessica Blunt
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p class="byline">
by Jessica Blunt
<br />2019 Unidata summer intern
</p>
<p>
The overarching theme of my projects this summer has been improving the accessibility of
the
<a href="https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/">Integrated Data Viewer</a> (IDV) for
the average scientist. The IDV is a versatile and powerful, though complicated, program.
</p>
<p>
When I ask people if they’ve heard of the IDV, there are two types of answers that stand
out. The first, a simple “no” or “I think someone mentioned it
once.” The second, something
like “I’ve tried to figure it out, but didn’t get very far.” I worked to reach
those who
gave the second answer.
</p>
<p><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/jquery/jquery.lightbox-0.5.css" media="screen" /></p>
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<div class="img_l" style="width: 150px;">
<a class="lightbox" title="Jessica Blunt" href="/blog_content/images/2019/20190611_jwiedemeier_1_400.jpg">
<img width="150" src="/blog_content/images/2019/20190611_jwiedemeier_1_400.jpg" alt="Jessica Blunt" />
</a>
<div class="caption">
Jessica Blunt
</div>
<p></div></p>
<p class="byline">
by
<a href="https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/news/entry/welcome-summer-intern-jessica-wiedemeier">Jessica
Blunt</a>
<br />2019 Unidata summer intern
</p>
<p>
The overarching theme of my projects this summer has been improving the accessibility of
the
<a href="https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/">Integrated Data Viewer</a> (IDV) for
the average scientist. The IDV is a versatile and powerful, though complicated, program.
</p>
<p>
When I ask people if they’ve heard of the IDV, there are two types of answers that stand
out. The first, a simple “no” or “I think someone mentioned it
once.” The second, something
like “I’ve tried to figure it out, but didn’t get very far.” I worked to reach
those who
gave the second answer.
</p>
<div class="img_r" style="width: 200px;">
<a class="lightbox" title="Showing multiple warning polygons in the IDV." href="/blog_content/images/2019/20190809_jessica_seminar_03.png">
<img width="200" src="/blog_content/images/2019/20190809_jessica_seminar_03s.png" alt="Surface map" />
</a>
<div class="caption"> Warning polygons<br />(click to enlarge)</div>
</div>
<p>
During my first week, I noticed that there was a way to show warning polygons from the
National Weather Service (NWS). This struck me as an incredibly useful feature, so I
started playing with it. It didn’t work. Broken features only make learning to use the IDV
more complicated, so I convinced Unidata IDV developer Yuan Ho (my mentor on this project)
to let me try to
tackle the issue. It took me quite some time to figure out where to insert the ~30 lines of
code needed to fix the problem in the IDV's roughly 1.5 million lines of source code, but I
eventually
managed to enhance the IDV to plot warning polygons one at a time. Yuan and I kept working
to make warning
polygon plotting less cumbersome, and the process is now greatly simplified.
</p>
<p style="font-style:italic;">
Editor's Note: The enhancements to polygon plotting are included in the
<a href="https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/downloads/idv/nightly/index.jsp">IDV nightly builds</a>,
and will be
included in the next official IDV release later this year.
</p>
<div class="img_l" style="width: 200px;margin-bottom:0;">
<a class="lightbox" title="GOES-East satellite bundle." href="/blog_content/images/2019/20190809_jessica_seminar_01.png">
<img width="200" src="/blog_content/images/2019/20190809_jessica_seminar_01.png" alt="Surface map" />
</a>
<div class="caption"> GOES-E satellite bundle</div>
</div>
<p class="clearfix">
The code itself wasn’t my main focus. Most of my time at Unidata was spent drafting,
recording, and editing tutorial videos for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/unidatanews">Unidata's
YouTube channel</a>. Topics ranged
from launching the program to creating complex, scalable, near-real-time bundles that could
be used again and again. I wanted the videos to be concise and relevant, so they’re short
(most under 6 minutes) and targeted to specific audiences.
</p>
<p>
Creating videos for different audiences led to the evolution of a structure of sub-series.
Find the series right for you and check it out!
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQut5OXpV-0hJEoY72aNWtgTmvcw3ZG6D">IDV
Basics</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQut5OXpV-0gdrSAYKEsJ6Hq04TPPtwTx">IDV
Intermediate Topics</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQut5OXpV-0iL8prkqj_55jbZBdO6cWa6">Fun
with Unidata’s IDV</a>
</li>
</ul>
<p>
There is also a YouTube playlist that collects <em>all</em> of the IDV videos: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVknrFVrO08&list=PLQut5OXpV-0gqVk8LFD6Riv6X3QcAVw_U">IDV</a>
</p>
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/entry/introducing_idv_5_0_lynxIntroducing IDV 5.0 - Lynx!Sean Arms2013-04-01T09:12:12-06:002017-11-27T13:53:37-07:00<p>Introducing IDV 5.0 - code name Lynx!</p><p>
Java3D has enabled beautiful 3D visualizations in the IDV. Unfortunately , the project
is very lightly maintained and has put the IDV in a quite the situation - if Java3D
no longer works, then the IDV no longer displays. This has caused quite a bit of
hand-wringing here at Unidata. Developer Julien Chastang was once quoted as saying
"If we cannot find a replacement for Java3D, I'm going back to paper...origami,
perhaps."
</p>
<p>
With that said, the IDV team is pleased to announce the IDV 5.0 release (code name
Lynx). Yes, we understand we just released IDV 4.0u1 last week, but we've had a
major breakthrough in visualization technology we use on the backend which warrants
a major version increase (talk about API breaks!). We've successfully bolted on
a new backend to the VisAD layer that will live on forever, while still perserving
all of the functionality our users are used to. For example, with the Java3D backend,
our user would see the following 3D global image:</p>
<p>
<img alt="IDV 4.0u1 with Java3D" src="/blog_content/images/2013/20130401_j3d.jpg" />
</p>
<p>Now, with the Lynx release, we get beautiful images such as this without relying
on Java3D (same visualization as above): </p>
<p>
<img alt="IDV 5.0 Lynx preview" src="/blog_content/images/2013/20130401_lynx1.png" />
</p>
<p>Note that we are still working on the scaling algorithm, but this should be fixed
in 5.0u1. The new zoom capabilities afforded by the new backend are fantastic:</p>
<p>
<img src="/blog_content/images/2013/20130401_lynx2.png" /> </p>
<p>For users that struggled with the colorbars in previous version of IDV, we feel they
will agree that the Lynx backend results are far superior. Jeff Weber (Unidata
TV personality) commented that the new colorscale is much more intuitive: "The
new visualization backend is much easier to use. For example, see that the little
pocket of moisture over the desert southwest? Not the '=~~=', but the '??=z?7'?
This is much better than a magenta color. I really think our users will dig this
new interface! Think of all the new meteorological jargon this will create. How
many new acronyms and initializations will be birthed from IDV Lynx?! I think we
just kicked it to the next level!"</p>
<p>It should be noted that lead IDV developer Yuan Ho was a bit more reserved in his
enthusiasm for the new release, but he said "while this new backed is great,
I feel it's greatest strength is that it will usher in a new era of teletype driven
analysis. Retro is the thing, and at leaset we are on the bleeding edge of the
movement." Developer Sean Arms loves the new IDV, but is really stuck on the
code name Lynx: "Cats are so overdone these days. Since this release is dubbed
as being 'reto', I felt like this release should be name IDV Hipster...I mean,
come on, our community was using teletype before it was cool...most students have
probably never heard of it. I could see IDV tee-shirts based on this hipster theme...it's
golden! But, you know, Lynx are pretty cool cats, I guess...but Ligers are better."</p>
<p>Speaking of retro, we would also welcome feedback on a new feature that we would
like to include in the IDV 5.1 release (currently scheduled to be released next
year, 04-01-2014) - we are calling GarpDV, a GARP inspired gui front-end for the
IDV. Thoughts, comments, and suggestions should be directed to support-idv-AT-unidata.ucar-DOT-edu.</p>
<p>Happy April 1st!</p>
<p>
The IDV Development Team
</p>