Novel Cyberinfrastructure Systems for Scientific Visualization of Large-Scale Radar and Satellite Data on the Web

As geoscientists are confronted with increasingly massive datasets from environmental observations to simulations, one of the biggest challenges is having the right tools to gain scientific insight from the data and communicate the understanding to stakeholders. Recent developments in web technologies make it easy to manage, visualize and share large data sets with the public. Novel visualization techniques and dynamic user interfaces allow users to interact with data, and change the parameters to create custom views of the data to gain insight from simulations and environmental observations. This requires developing new data models and intelligent knowledge discovery techniques to explore and extract information from complex computational simulations and large data repositories. Scientific visualization will be an increasingly important part to build comprehensive environmental information platforms. This presentation provides an overview of the information visualization and communication tools developed for communicating meteorological and atmospheric and modeling results utilizing graphical processing unit and latest web technologies in a web browser. The data sets include raw and processed data from many atmospheric radars (XPOL, NPOL, NEXRAD), and satellites from Iowa Flood Center and NASA activities in Iowa. Novel hardware systems allow user to interact with the data using hand-gestures, body motion, and visualize the data in augmented reality and immersive reality modes.