Using Vis5d+ to Visualize Five Dimensional Data on a Three Dimensional Grid

Using Vis5d+ to Visualize Five Dimensional Data on a Three Dimensional Grid

Prepared for: Carmen Benkovitz

By: Ron Huegel

August 10, 2002

Introduction

Data visualization is a technique for visually exploring physical (temperature, pressure, viscosity, etc.) processes in science and engineering. The development of efficient visualization software tools and techniques (algorithms) continues to be an active area of research. Computers continue to grow in speed, memory, and functionality in accordance with Moore’s Law, which states “chip density (roughly) doubles every eighteen months” (Boyd). This fact should suggest that the software used by computers must grow at a proportional pace. Moore’s Law has held true for over twenty years despite skepticism from some physicists. There is no law or equation governing the growth of software; however, the graphics capabilities of PC’s and video games have grown rapidly over the past several years.

Software programs are a very necessary component of any experiment in modern day science. Without any way of reading and displaying data, science would slow to an absolute crawl. There are currently countless numbers of software programs available on the open market, and there are also many programs that can be downloaded from the Internet at no cost. These cost-free downloads are known as “open source” software.

Open source is not a well-supported means by which to operate a software package. Much of the time software that is open to the public is left unsupported or poorly supported by the author or authors. Then again, much of the software that we buy in the stores is not very well supported either. That is not to say that open source is not quality software. There are plenty of high quality programs ready to be downloaded from the Internet. Sometimes the people currently using the program may even support a software package by communicating problems and insight via e-mail or through web site bulletins.

Vis5D is an open source software package currently available for download from the Internet. Some scientists who display weather data are currently using Vis5D. The Visualization Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) by Bill Hibbard, Johan Kellum, and Brian Paul wrote the software. Their goal was to “design a means by which to interactively visualize large 5-D gridded data sets such as those produced by numerical weather models” (“Vis5D”).

The goal of this project is to determine if Vis5D+ is a feasible software program for better analyzing model output data (MOPUT) being mapped at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The data comes from Carmen Benkovitz of the Brookhaven Department of Environmental Sciences division of Atmospheric Sciences.

The National Weather Service has been using Vis5D+ to visualize various weather variables such as humidity, wind vectors, and cloud formations for the past several years. This data is similar to the data processed by Carmen Benkovitz and her team, so Vis5D+ may be a good tool for visualization of MOPUT.

Materials and Methods

Downloading and compiling the Vis5D+ software proved to be quite a challenge and required the help of a computer programmer. The downloading and uncompressing went smoothly; however, when it came to compiling the program, several errors were encountered. With some help, it was determined that a missing library, which was not installed on our system, caused the problem. Since this library was not critical to the application of Vis5D+, the library was excluded from the compilation process. Subsequently, there were no other problems compiling Vis5D+.

At this point, Vis5D+ was run with several sample data sets that were downloaded from the Internet. These samples ran well; the only glitch at this point was a “reverse” function in the Vis5D+ user interface. This function is supposed to reverse white and black colors. This feature is not a necessity for the experiment and has not been addressed to date.

The next obstacle was to convert data to a format that can be read by Vis5D+. With help from Robert Bennett, who determined the data ordering and offsets, the MOPUT was successful converted to Vis5D+ format.

Once the data was converted to a format that could be read by Vis5D+,