Ultrascale Climate Data Visualization and Analysis Using DV3D and UVCDAT.

Abstract:

Earth system scientists are being inundated by an explosion of data generated by ever-increasing resolution in both global models and remote sensors. Advanced tools for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing very large and complex climate data are required to maintain rapid progress in Earth system research. To meet this need, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center is developing an advanced computational infrastructure that can provide high-performance analysis and visualization capabilities to the desktops of climate scientists.

In collaboration with the Ultra-scale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT) development consortium, NCCS is developing climate data analysis and visualization tools for UV-CDAT, which provides data analysis capabilities for the Earth System Grid (ESG). These tools feature workflow interfaces, interactive 3D data exploration, hyperwall and stereo visualization, automated provenance generation, parallel task execution, and streaming data parallel pipelines. NASA’s DV3D is a UV-CDAT package that enables exploratory analysis of diverse and rich data sets from various sources including the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). DV3D provides user-friendly workflow interfaces for advanced visualization and analysis of climate data at a level appropriate for scientists.

DV3D’s integration with CDAT’s climate data management system (CDMS) and other tools provides a wide range of climate data analysis operations, e.g. simple arithmetic operations, regridding, conditioned comparisons, weighted averages, various statistical operations, etc. Several teams are developing parallel versions of these tools that will enable users to analyze and display large data sets that cannot currently be processed with existing desktop tools. This enables scientists to run analyses that were previously intractable due to the large size of the datasets and, using DV3D, seamlessly couple these analyses with advanced visualization methods.