From SuperMe

Contents 1 Geological Data Visualization 1.1 Project Description 1.1.1 Abstract: 1.1.2 Background: 1.1.3 Related Work: 1.2 Weekly Reports 1.3 Final Report 1.4 Sample Output 1.5 Additional Items

Geological Data Visualization

Andrew Pellett
6/2/08
Advisors:

• Sean Birkel
• Peter Koons

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Project Description

Abstract:

The goal of this project is to optimize code for the post-processing of data in the network Common Data Form (netCDF) into informative visualizations, and provide an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the underlying code. The GUI will allow the user to generate a visualization based on a simplified set of parameters (e.g. data type, time period, color gradient, coordinate system, etc.). The code will be able to produce sequences of images using different coordinate systems that will allow the images to be overlaid onto Google Earth using KML. Other goals include overlaying images onto a globe independent of Google Earth, and possibly generating an animation of the images. Another goal is to make this project available to Maine middle school students using state their state provided laptops. These laptops do not have MATLAB, but do have the Gnu C compiler (gcc) because they are BSD based, so ideally the code should be written in C.

Background:

The basic functionality of the code will be to plot some (any) data with x and y coordinates corresponding to a location on a map. The z-dimension value will be plotted as a color gradient. The GUI should be simple enough for middle school students to understand and use, but powerful enough to provide meaningful data visualization usable in high school and even college level classes.

Related Work:

The project is based on existing code for post-processing of data from the Earth Science Research Lab (ESRL) at the National Centers for Environmental Predictions (NCEP). The data are collected in 6-hour increments, and available for download online at:

www.cdc.noaa.gov/Composites/Hour/

The current code is in the form of a MATLAB script, and outputs images accompanied by a KML file. The code takes on the order of tens of hours to process a year's worth of data of a single variable. The code is also very memory intensive. A different language, such as C, should provide faster, more efficient performance.

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Weekly Reports

Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

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Final Report

Final report

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Sample Output

eece.maine.edu/~apellett
Sample output is available here. It is not updated regularly, and may not represent the current progress of the project.

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Additional Items

Basic Google Earth animation using KML
Google Earth lab presentation/handout
This document briefly described how to make a basic Google Earth animation using Keyhole Markup Language (KML)