Innovative uses of 3D and debates on user interaction were among the highlights of a week of events on visualisation in meteorology at ECMWF.
The events, which took place between 28 September and 2 October 2015, attracted over 100 external participants representing national meteorological services, research institutes and commercial organisations from around the world.
The programme included two workshops, a Royal Meteorological Society seminar, a hands-on ‘plug-fest’ and an exhibition of visualisation systems.
User interaction
The week included the annual meeting of the European Working Group on Operational Meteorological Workstations (EGOWS) and ECMWF’s workshop on Meteorological Operational Systems. There were over 50 presentations on topics ranging from the handling of observational data and cloud processing services to visualisations for forecasters and advanced web interfaces.
Many presenters highlighted the need to offer features for users to interact with each other, resulting in systems offering facilities to share information and visualisations.
Visualisation is an important communication tool.
The presentations of the workshops were complemented by the Royal Meteorological Society’s seminar on visualisation. Besides the use of visualisation at ECMWF and the UK Met Office, participants also discussed the usefulness of visualisation in education and the effective styling of weather maps.
The working groups discussed possibilities for co-operation within the meteorological and related communities and the progress and future priorities of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) developments.
Exhibitions feature innovative 3D
One of the high points of the week was the exhibition of 18 visualisation systems, including all the main forecaster workstation systems developed and used in Europe and South Korea.
The exhibition was one of the highlights of the week.
The exhibition also included the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) visualisation system from Unidata and the EarthServer web service operated by MEEO. The popular Iris and CDO (Climate Data Operator) packages for data processing and visualisation were also demonstrated. ECMWF contributed with its Metview workstation and ecCharts web service for forecasters.
Demonstrations of the Weather3DeXplorer, developed and operated by the Dutch national weather forecasting service (KNMI), were very popular and showed how this virtual reality framework for 3D visualisation can be used to explore meteorological data. The demonstrations included model output from KNMI and ECMWF.
The Dutch national weather forecasting service demonstrated its use of 3D visualisations.
Participants had to put on special glasses to see the images and animations in 3D.
The globe display from Pufferfish (top photo) was also popular, showing model output from ECMWF in a new and undistorted way and allowing users to interact with the displayed data.
MetOcean DWG plug-fest
The week ended with a plug-fest organised by the MetOcean OGC Domain Working Group (DWG). For the first time the plug-fest included not only Web Map Services (WMS), but also Web Coverage Services (WCS).
The plug-fest proved very popular.
In a very hands-on session, various servers were tested with the available clients. “The session highlighted the progress that the meteorological community has achieved in recent years in making use of these established GIS (Geographic Information System) standards,” said Stephan Siemen from ECMWF, who was involved in organising the week of events. Feedback from the plug-fest will be presented to the OGC.
Programme and presentations
The full programme and PDFs of most of the presentations are available on the ‘Visualisation in Meteorology week 2015' web page.
Participants from 27 countries attended the week of events.