October 2017 - March 2018
Yuan Ho, Cece Hedrick, Julien Chastang
We have no questions at this time.
__Latest netCDF-Java Version__
The version of the netCDF-Java library currently distributed with the latest stable IDV version (5.4) is the 4.6.10 (April 19, 2017). The prior version of netCDF-Java to be distributed with the IDV was 4.6.7. There have been many improvements and bug fixes in that range. The nightly development version of the IDV is currently being distributed with the 4.6.12-SNAPSHOT version netCDF-Java library. The complete release notes for these versions can be found here.
__ISL Changes__
ISL movie and image capture improvements for DRILSDOWN project.
__Java Version__
The IDV is distributed with Java 8 u51. Because of a Windows 10 related bug on some older Intel hardware, this will be the latest version of Java we will be deploying with the IDV for some time.
__Java 3D Version__
The IDV is distributed with Java 3D version 1.6.0 Final. Java 3D 1.7 prerelease is under development and continues to be supported in some capacity by the open source community.
__HTTP to HTTPS__
As the web transitions from HTTP to HTTPS, we update URL references in the IDV (rbi files, plugin files, etc.) to reflect these changes.
__Java Code Refactorings__
Improving Java coding standards in the IDV code base.
__3D Isentropic Analysis__
Isentropic analysis is a very common and effective way to diagnose and visualize vertical motion of the atmosphere, the new isentropic analysis on the constant potential temperature surface helps us better understand the dynamic and stability of weather phenomenons. This new feature allows IDV users to do the isentropic analysis on a regular isobaric gridded dataset without any vertical coordinate conversion.
__GOES 16__
GOES 16 imagery available from ADDE servers on atm.ucar.edu and lead.unidata.ucar.edu. See the IDV Dashboard, Data Choosers Tab, Images node to select these ADDE servers to obtain GOES-16 imagery.
__2D/3D Trajectories__
Continued improvements and enhancements in the underlying VisAD library has enabled a new grid 2D/3D trajectory feature in the IDV. The 2D/3D grid trajectories can be colored by speed or other parameters. The initial area of the trajectory is the entire domain of the dataset. However, regions can be selected with points, rectangles and closed polygons.
There are a variety of grid trajectory types including ribbon, cylinder, deform ribbon, point.
__Latest Version of VisAD__
The SSEC team at UW, Madison has made a number of improvements to support 3D trajectories.
Jeff Weber and Yuan are collaborating with David Gochis, and David Yates from NCAR-RAL assisting them ensuring WRF-Hydro data is CF compliant regarding Point Feature type. In addition, we are helping them with visualization of this dataset in the IDV. Yuan will present
to the National Water Center, on March 27th, findings regarding data format and ways to make the WRF-Hydro output more accessible by the Unidata community.
IDV 5.4 was released in May of 2017.
In collaboration, with University of Miami Professor Brian Mapes, Unidata submitted an EarthCube proposal: “Drilling down from a statistics scatterplot to pre-populated case notebooks”. This proposal was awarded $1.3 million over three years.
Unidata hired Celia Hedrick, a Software Engineer II to work on this project.
IDV Publication Highlights
Synoptic–Dynamic Meteorology in 3D: Introducing an IDV-Based Lab Manual by Gary Lackmann, B. Mapes and K. Tyle
A Google Scholar Search reveals a number of publications that cite use of the IDV (doi:10.5065/D6RN35XM).
__2017 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting__
__2018 American Meteorological Conference (AMS) Annual Meeting__
__IDV scatter display__
We will integrate the scatter display feature of the McV into the IDV for imagery dataset and 2D gridded dataset.
__IDV Seam Issues__
We will continue to collaborate with the Unidata netCDF-Java team to devise a solution for
long-standing longitude seam issues in the IDV.
__Investigation of Java 3D Alternative__
Because of concerns about the long-term viability the open-source Java 3D project, the IDV team has begun discussions with our University of Wisconsin, SSEC collaborators to replace Java 3D with a more viable alternative within the VisAD API. We have started investigating whether the Ardor 3D can meet that objective. Looking into alternatives to Java 3D was also a goal described in the Unidata 2018 Five-year plan.
__E-Support__
The IDV team continues to provide the geoscience community with high-quality support through e-support software and idv-users mail list. The volume of e-support remains high and constitutes a large fraction of our daily activities. In the last half year the IDV team has closed ~50 e-support tickets. Each individual ticket may and often does involve many back-and-forth messages. There is an especially large number of support requests coming from international users.
__Usage Metrics__
Raw IDV usage metrics, are available here http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/logging/left.html.
Top ten universities running IDV are: Millersville, Oklahoma, University of Utah, St Cloud state, Plymouth, NC State, West Kentucky, Lyndon State, University of Illinois, and San Francisco State.
__GitHub Pull Requests__
In the area of greater collaborative development, since the migration of the IDV project to github, we have closed a total of 113 “pull requests” or code contributions from internal and external collaborators.
__Youtube IDV Instructional Videos__
In the area of online IDV training, the Youtube IDV instructional videos have been viewed 15,000 times compared with 13,200 from six months ago.
We support the following goals described in Unidata Strategic Plan:
Prepared March 2018