The IDV reference application is a geoscience display and analysis software system with many of the standard data displays that other meteorological software (e.g., NCL, GrADS, GEMPAK, McIDAS, Vis5D) provide. Yet the IDV is unique in its ability to integrate a wide range of multi-disciplinary data from local and remote sources, producing three dimensional (3D) displays that provide unique insights into the structure of the earth system. The IDV allows users to interactively slice and probe the data, creating cross-sections, profiles, animations and value read-outs of multi-dimensional data sets. This easily installed, platform-independent application runs on most operating systems and allows anyone with an internet connection anywhere to access a range of atmospheric data from a variety of sources. Additionally, the IDV can be used to visualize and analyze non-meteorological data from mantle convection simulations and earthquake locations to oceanographic model output and observation data.
The open-source IDV framework is highly customizable and allows new applications to be tailored to specific datasets or provide customized user interfaces for different tasks. The GEON-IDV (http://geon.unavco.org/unavco/IDV_for_GEON.html) is an extension of the framework supporting geophysical visualizations. The robustness of the framework and the support of the developers led the University of Wisconsin/SSEC to use it as the basis for the next version of McIDAS to provide tools for hyper-spectral image visualization and analysis. The Unidata Program Center and the Shanghai Tropical Institute are developing the Tropical Cyclone IDV (TC-IDV) for use by researchers and forecasters in studying typhoons and hurricanes.
With the impending move of NAWIPS/GEMPAK to the AWIPS II environment, the Unidata community has been looking to the IDV as a replacement for some of the functionality provided by that package. In an effort to include some of the commonly used features of NAWIPS/GEMPAK in the IDV, the IDV developers have focused on that task over the past year. The IDV now reads in GEMPAK grid files and can display these in 2-D or 3-D displays. Many of the GEMPAK grid diagnostics are now available in the IDV as well. Support for scalable vector (PDF, PostScript, SVG) output of the displays was added in the 2.6 release, based on work done by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABoM). An objective analysis module, also based on work by the ABoM, was also included in this release for gridding in-situ observations on the fly. Additional work is in progress to support isentropic coordinate analysis. Requirements gathered by the Unidata User's Committee and the IDV Steering Committee will be used to prioritize future development in this area.
In addition to the NAWIPS/GEMPAK functionality, other work has been focused on incorporating new data sets and/or remote access to other datasets. The IDV can now access NEXRAD Level II (including super resolution) and Level III datasets from a THREDDS Data Server (TDS). This provides on the fly access to an important dataset that traditionally required a continual, high bandwidth connection. Work is in progress on accessing point data from the TDS using the new scientific features library of the Java netCDF package. Support for version 4.0 of that package has improved the efficiency and capabilities of netCDF file access and aggregation. Improvements in the import/export of Google Earth KML have been made also over the past year .
The IDV has evolved steadily over the past 5 years to support the needs of the educators and researchers in the atmospheric and related sciences. Over the next 5 years, we expect this evolution to continue with new features, access to new types of data and new and innovative visualization techniques.
Supplementary URL: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv