Re: DEM and GeoTIFF to VisAD

Hi Kevin-

Kevin Manross wrote:

I am just getting ready to do something similar to what you are describing to use for visualizing a radar beam path and where it may possibly intersect with the terrain surrounding the radar.

Sounds like a good application.

I am still getting my feet wet with VisAD and had planned on using Ugo's example 6.6 from his tutorial as a guide. I was going to try and write a DEMViewer of sorts (but now that you have brought Ugo's DEMViewer to my attention, I may try to use his) and place a DataReferenceImpl in the DEM data.

One end of the line would be anchored at he radar site and the other end would be used to "sweep" around the X-Y 2D domain. The terrain along the line would be displayed in an adjacent window in an X-Z 2D display - again similar to Ugo's example 6.6.

(please see http://www.cimms.ou.edu/~kmanross/VCPRPE/NSSL_WDTB_VCPRPE-example.html for an idea of this project)

I don't know if I am adding much to your inquiry, but it sounds like I am working along the same lines as you are. Please feel free to contact me for additional questions.

It's good food for thought.  In Unidata Integrated Data Viewer,
we can display Level II radar data as 3D cones.  If you add
in topography, you can see where it intersects.  The interesting
thing I found while doing this is that the curvature of the
earth accounts for a faster dropoff of the beam to the surface
than the tilt of the beam itself.  For here in CO, I was going
to use it to show how the Front Range radar intersects the mountains
at the low tilts, but it can really see pretty far since the earth
drops off quickly.

I'll ponder how you might be able to do what you want in the
IDV or at least using the IDV components. We are currently
working on generating RHI plots which would be displayed in a
separate window and can be controlled by a
moveable line in the display.  Adding in the topography to the
cross section might not be a bad idea. We have plans to allow
the user to select the elevation angle as well.  The nice thing
is that VisAD handles all the heavy work of resampling.

We'll be showing this off at the AMS meeting in January.

Don
*************************************************************
Don Murray                               UCAR Unidata Program
dmurray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                        P.O. Box 3000
(303) 497-8628                              Boulder, CO 80307
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/donm
*************************************************************



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