Senior Project - GLOVe

One of the purposes of the Scientific Visualization Group (SVG) of NCAR is to provide scientists with means to visualize their scientific data in various forms. In particular, scientists often need to display weather data on top of maps. There exist libraries of routines that allow for the management of scientific data files, the creation and display of maps in various projections, and for the display of weather data (e.g. in the form of contours) on top of these maps. However, these libraries require the scientist to write a program, typically in FORTRAN, to use the various libraries to accomplish the task. The project developed by the students provides an interactive, quick-look capability for scientific data and map information. As an example, a scientist may select a file of data from a menu, select a map projection type, and have the system create a color visual of the data. The project was implemented in C to run on UNIX workstations, using the X Window System. It also used netCDF (Network Common Data Form) for the management of data, NCAR Graphics for the generation of maps and contours, and ctrans (a project developed by a previous senior project team) for the display of the resulting computer graphics metafile.