The IDV: Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer

Mike Voss

Department of Meteorology

SJSU – Oct 11, 2006

Outline

• Unidata’s Role in Geosciences Education

• Motivation for developing the IDV

• Hands off introduction to the IDV

• Hands on IDV session

Unidata

• Located in Boulder, NSF funded, part of UCAR

• Mission

“ Provide data, tools, and community leadership for enhanced earth system education”

• Main software and systems

– netCDF, LDM/IDD, GEMPAK, McIDAS, THREDDS

– and now the IDV

• Voss and Cordero (and the lab)

Motivation for developing the IDV

• Enable remote access to data

• 3-D visualization

• Data formats – netCDF, grib, grib2, text, others

• Platform independence - Java

• Leverage web services

Real-time Data Volume Issues

• LDM/IDD - 3 GB of real-time data per hour…and increasing

• Bandwidth hog, very inefficient

• Limits participation because you need bandwidth and expertise to handle data, both of which are expensive.

• Solution: build remote access into software

Remote Access to Data

• Remote access capability over the Internet relieves the need to distribute all the data…and lowers the barriers to entry: “democratization of data”

• Unidata is making this happen with IDV and THREDDS catalogs. (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services)

• Current software (GEMPAK) does not allow remote access to data

Introduction to the IDV

• Hands off demo

Disadvantages & Limitations of the IDV

• Different, new software to learn

• Can’t save data with a bundle…..yet

• Slow, memory hog…needs at least 1 GB of RAM

• Not yet ideal for meteorological analysis….has limited grid diagnostic capabilities

• 3D Meteorology is a new paradigm…it’s hard to overcome

established methods for observation and analysis

OK, let’s try the IDV

• Go to a computer

• Start the IDV

• Also start a web browser and go to my web page: http://www.met.sjsu.edu/faculty/voss.html

– (and click on the instructions)

• Follow instructions