VCDAT: Bringing Climate Analysis and Visualization to the Browser

The Community Data Analysis Tools (CDAT) have had many names since their origin in 1989, but the purpose has remained the same: to provide capabilities for validating, comparing, and diagnosing climate model behavior. VCDAT (Visual CDAT) is a new browser-based UI for interacting with the CDAT libraries, connecting JavaScript visualization libraries, an HTML/JavaScript user interface, and the existing Python CDAT libraries (themselves wrapped around C, C++, and Fortran). The aim of the project is to democratize computational resources, speeding up every day efforts and enabling the direct analysis and visualization of the balooning model output for scientists without "Big Data" training.