Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
WASP Award:
The WASP project is on hold until work on the VAPOR 2.5.0 release is completed.
KISTI Award:
Work continued toward a version 2.5.0 release candidate. A code feature freeze took place in the middle of October, and the team began to work on sev. 6 bugs.
Scott had previously applied transparency to a map product called Natural Earth, and while this map had a high resolution, it had a different color map than the old Blue Marble product that came with our installers. We still needed a replacement for that, so Scott programmatically applied transparency to NASA’s “Next Generation” version of Blue Marble using a GEBCO bathymetry data set.
Scott modified his quadratic interpolator to use linear interpolation in the horizontal plane instead of nearest neighbor. He also gathered performance information to compare the old linear interpolation method to the new quadratic one. The linear interpolation performed ~38% faster than quadratic. Scott also made the necessary gui changes in the User Preferences menu, as well as the necessary changes to the EventRouter, Params, and DataStatus classes.
Scott worked with Alan to scale the stereo convergence controls to have a range between 1 and 1. Once this final requirement was completed, updates to the GUI were made for final testing.
John prepared a progress report on the KISTI contract, and then met with KISTI staff while attending the Korean Supercomputing Conference. KISTI has indicated their intent to fund VAPOR development again next year.
2.x Development:
Alan made improvements to the key-framing code so that users will not see keyframes that are automatically inserted for them (this was causing confusion).
3.x Development:
On hold pending 2.5 release.
Administrative:
John authored several sections of the 2015 CISLAR and POPPR reports.
John submitted an ASP Graduate Visitor Program application to have Samuel Li return for a three month visit starting in January. Samuel would continue his scientific data compression work.
Education and Outreach:
John and Alan attended IEEE VisWeek in Chicago.
Scott has been in touch with Jeff Smith from the UCAR President’s Office, who has been asking for information on the visualization of Peter Sullivan’s LES model that was done last year. Peter and Scott met with Jeff for an interview which will be used in an AtmosNews article in the coming weeks.
Feature Tracking:
Climate data compression:
Two of CGD’s oceanographers are working with Scott to create a new visualization based on their ROMS data. So far, Scott has held two meetings with them where he first demonstrated flow visualization in a region of high interest. He then elicited more requirements that Vapor could fulfill in order to produce publishable research. Helping them with publication is Scott’s first goal. Secondary to that is to create a visualization that can showcase Vapor and at the same time engage a more general audience. Scott is also acquiring resources from VETS so he can add supplementary visuals into the final production that are created outside of Vapor. Lastly, Scott has implemented a tool for his own personal use (will not be checked in unless asked to) that will fade a single renderer into or out from the scene. In his last visualization he had to fade the renderers manually which was very precarious and time consuming.