The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV)—A discipline agnostic tool for geoscience exploration

Unidata has been developing the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) as a general purpose tool for displaying and analyzing geoscientific datasets. The freely available, Java™-based reference application is easily installed on most computer platforms. While the reference application's interface is geared toward atmospheric science, the underlying framework is discipline agnostic. Data only needs to be georeferenced to be displayed in the IDV. Because of this, the IDV is being used in oceanographic, hydrologic and geophysical disciplines, as well as atmospheric science. Some users are accessing and displaying their data in the reference application while others are creating customized versions that meet the needs of their users.

The latest (1.2) release supports more formats of data through the netCDF for Java's Common Data Model (CDM) interface. Support for direct reading of GRIB, GRIB2, WSR-88D Level II & III, point observation and aircraft trajectory data from local disk and remote servers has been added. Model data on staggered grids from WRF and ROMS models is supported through this interface. The underlying VisAD data model enables the IDV to easily combine multidisciplinary data from local and remote sources in the same interface. The IDV supports several GIS data including shapefiles, GeoTIFF and data from WMS servers. All these features make it an excellent tool for geoscience exploration.