The New Trajectory Display in the UNIDATA's IDV

In the latest developments, the IDV has added new 2D/3D grid trajectories and volume trajectories display. A volume trajectory is defined by a trajectory that uses the entire volume of the mass being studied as the start points of the trajectory sequence. Therefore, the trajectory tracks the entire mass through time. The IDV takes advantage of the latest versions of the netCDF-Java and VisAD libraries, both of which allow more efficient data access than previous versions. This leads to less memory use on the local system while providing better performancce than the prior IDV releases. Four new trajectory display types further enrich the data visualization experience: Cylinder, Ribbon, Deformed Ribbon, and Point. Trajectory data has previously been viewed as a simple line. Now, with these four new trajectory display types, users can visualize the data with a richer physical representation of a parcel's movement through space over a given time period. This gives the user a more in-depth understanding of the dynamical processes occurring as the atmospheric volume being studied evolves over time and enable more meteorological information to be derived from this visualization software.