| IDL Helps Visualize Complex Earth Data in NOAA's "Science on a Sphere™" Project
As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) approaches its fourth decade, it continues to serve its mission to support ecosystem management, climate change, freshwater supply and homeland security. To reach its goals, NOAA implemented several programs to educate public audiences and increase understanding of environmental concerns. NOAA's Science on a Sphere™ (SOS) program is an innovative project designed to visually depict the Earth's climate, weather and oceans so the public can understand the Earth's systems and how they interact. RSI's IDL has been instrumental in helping to project SOS scientific data sets onto a giant sphere in a visually stunning and educational demonstration.
The SOS Mission
Alexander MacDonald, director of the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, pioneered the SOS project. MacDonald's vision was to create a mechanism that allowed the public to visualize many of the Earth's global features in a "real-life" view. Intended for museums, science centers, schools and other scientific venues, SOS provides a dramatic visualization of complex information in an understandable form.
"I knew that putting NOAA climate, weather, oceanic and geophysical data on a sphere would be a spectacular tool for explaining NOAA's science to a variety of audiences," said MacDonald.
 |
|
David Himes, senior software engineer for SOS, was brought onto the SOS team as the primary software developer. An early prototype of the system had already existed, and Himes was hired to improve on the early system by increasing the frame rate to full 30 FPS, improving the pixel resolution of the imagery, and by providing tools and interfaces to make the system easier to use and more visually appealing. |
"NOAA plays an extremely important role in studying the Earth and the atmosphere. We wanted to display all of the agency's great research in a way that makes sense to all audiences - in the form of a sphere," said Himes. "By using computers along with video projection and visualization technologies such as IDL, we can look at complex data intuitively and proportionate to scale. This helps everyone understand the dynamic relationships between the different Earth systems, land, oceans and atmosphere."
The Problem with Multi-Format Data
Using high-speed computers, projectors and advanced imaging techniques in a multimedia setting, SOS creates the illusion of a planet, the sun, the moon and other celestial bodies. The fiberglass sphere acts as a 3D "movie screen" onto which images are projected to represent various scientific data sets, including satellite data, weather data and ocean data. |
|
 |
The SOS engineers encountered a challenge when trying to import data sets from other labs and scientific organizations onto the sphere. The SOS team obtained the data in multiple formats from so many different sources, and needed the right tools to handle all of them. To create an effective visualization, they needed the ability to conveniently aggregate and display the data sets from multiple viewing perspectives onto the sphere.
IDL Solves the Data Projection Challenge
Kevin Brundage, a research associate with NOAA's Regional Analysis and Prediction Branch, was called upon to provide a solution to the data projection challenge. A long-time user of IDL, Brundage immediately identified IDL as the solution. He used IDL to generate code to accurately and quickly project the atmospheric data set onto the sphere.
"All of my IDL code, including code for the GUI interface, was only a couple of hundred lines long. I'd hate to do this all by hand," said Brundage. "Importing data from other labs from within and outside of NOAA was a new problem, and projecting it became difficult. IDL really solved this issue. Using IDL, we were able to get the data accurately projected in a day," he added.
Brundage used IDL to convert data from a variety of sources, including numerical forecast models showing weather predictions, climate simulations showing the effects on temperature as greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere, and other simulations.
The Future: Real-Time Data
The SOS project uses at least a dozen data sets. Most of the atmospheric data, collected by NOAA satellites and numeric forecast models, is near real-time. Brundage wrote an IDL application that allows SOS to read data in near real-time, interpolate it and feed it to the SOS system. Most of the other data sets the SOS team used are historical or case study data.
"I think we'll start doing even more real-time data projection. The concept of looking at real-time data on the sphere is very powerful because it makes the SOS project not just a teaching tool, but a research tool as well," said Brundage.
More information about the SOS project can be found on the following Web site: http://www.fsl.noaa.gov/sos/
|
