Decision Makers, Researchers, and Operational Centers are being provided exponentially increasing information. Growth in sensor data is rapidly increasing with new instruments. However the impact is even greater because of growth in analysis, reanalysis and model data which is increasing even more rapidly. There are not enough experts in one place to be able to examine, understand, and take responsible action on such a large amount of data and analysis with scope ranging from global to regional to local in actions and impacts.

Long distance or distributed collaborations are being recognized as the future of all major research and analysis functions for the earth sciences. Raytheon and JPL scientists and engineers collaborated on a project that has developed new integrated visualization and data analysis capabilities to display environmental & weather data across a distributed system.

JPL supplied hurricane data (Hurricane Helene a category 3 hurricane during the 2006 season) from both observations (GHRSST, QuickScat, TRMM) and model (Weather Research and Forecasting – WRF) in HDF5 data format. Raytheon supplied Vis and DIAG (Data, Instrument, and Analysis GUI). 3D visualization of rainfall, vector winds, sea surface temperature, and earth topography/bathymetry are simultaneously visualized in Vis. Vis allows gaming type control of pan, zoom, rotate functions to view data, and advanced controls such as toggling between data sets, opacity selection of data sets and discrete timestepping. It also allows continuously variable time rates. DIAG provides capability to create plots and graphs such as histograms, footprint locations of observations, difference plots of model vs. observed data and allows for interactive selection of parameters while running. DIAG and Vis are synchronized so that DIAG plots update with changing data being visualized by Vis.

This presentation will demonstrate the results of the Raytheon/JPL collaboration.