Data Analysis Services Group - January 2013

News and Accomplishments

VAPOR Project

Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu

XD Vis Award:

Efforts to refactor code to ease extensibility and improve maintainability resumed. The generic netCDF data translators were completely rewritten and are now based on the NetCDFCollection class object developed earlier. The NetCDFCollection class hides all netCDF API details from its users. Work began to migrate the MOM ocean data translators over to the NetCDFCollection class as well. Long term, all model-specific data translators that operate on netCDF files will be migrated to NetCDFCollection, providing a common code base.

KISTI Award:

Seunghoon Lee, a numerical weather modeler, arrived for a two month visit with the VAPOR team on January 7. Seunghoon is getting spun up on VAPOR with WRF weather data and ROMS ocean data. His goal for his visit is to prototyping the visualization of combined ocean and weather data. Seunghoon attended the annual week-long WRF tutorial at Foothills lab the week of January 28.

Development:

Most of the VAPOR teams efforts have been focused on fixing bugs and performing final regression testing for the 2.2.0 VAPOR release.    We had a code freeze on Jan 30 and expect to release the code the first week of February. Bug fixes and other activities of note include:

  • Fixing defects in the unsteady flow coloring and improvements to key-framing.
  • A number of platform-dependent isosurface and DVR rendering problems were corrected
  • Support for Windows OS diagnostics were added
  • Numerous fixes were made to the ROMS data translator
  • The code was "purified" and numerous memory related problems were corrected.

Administrative:

  • Yannick Polius tendered his resignation after receiving an offer for a permanent position elsewhere. John and Alan worked with Yannick to assume responsibility for his numerous code contributions.
  • A new SEII job position has been posted to replace Yannick.
  • A transition plan was developed to migrate VAPOR development to NWSC.

Education and Outreach:

  • Alan attended AMS 2013 in Austin, TX, and presented a talk “Visualization and Analysis of Numerical Weather Prediction data using Python in VAPOR” on January 8, at the AMS Python workshop.  There was a lot of interest at the conference in the use of Python for analyzing and simulating weather data.
  • There was also a well-attended town hall on Hurricane Sandy at AMS on January 7.  Mel Shapiro gave a scientific perspective on the storm, and used several of the VAPOR visualizations of Sandy that we have been working on.
  • Alan worked in the WRF 2013 tutorial labs, showing students how to use VAPOR. 
  • Two invited talks were submitted and subsequently accepted for EGU (European AGU conference) 2013 (in Vienna in April).

Software Research Projects

Feature Tracking:

Climate data compression:

ASD Support

John produced more, and hopefully final, animations for Peter Ireland. Peter's group is running a 2048^3 turbulence simulation with particles.

Production Visualization Services & Consulting

  • Alan met with Mel Shapiro and identified changes to make for a final video of Sandy that we can distribute.  These animations were finalized, and we are following up with Perry Domingo to create a movie containing final versions of the Hurricane Sandy animations

Publications, Papers & Presentations

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Systems Projects

File System Space Management Project

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Accounting & Statistics Project

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Security & Administration Projects

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System Monitoring Project

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NWSC Planning & Installation

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System Support

Data Analysis & Visualization Clusters

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GLADE Storage Cluster

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Data Transfer Cluster

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Lynx Cluster

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Other

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