The Atmospheric Visualization Collection (AVC) is a National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project. There are two essential components to this collection. The first are weather images based on data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. The second is educational material based on these images developed by a growing educational community.

2. VISUALIZATION

A visitor to www.nsdl.arm.gov can view near real time images for most of the instruments at the SGP site. Efforts now are turning towards producing more interesting weather images such as contour plots, wind field plots, skewt plots, and animations of these plots. These images are used in undergraduate research as well as data quality efforts.

IDL and Matlab visualization routines used to produce these images are available for download to use in graduate research. An interactive software repository is available to encourage open source development efforts for this collection, while a web forum is available to discuss possible improvements. In addition, quality of visualization routines is ensured through the ARM scientific review process.

3. EDUCATION

The user community has started with an outreach program to middle school and high school physical science teachers. These teachers are initiating classroom and student based atmospheric projects that will use the wide range of weather images available through this collection. These instructors are establishing connections to students and other teachers, which has started in the Illinois-Missouri-Indiana region and is expanding to a national base of users. Community development already involves workshops at conferences for the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), web based classes, and summer classes based on this collection. The teachers author, contribute and evaluate material being developed for this growing community of users.

4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0086225 and the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation or the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program.