Anais do IX SIBGRAPI'96 (1996), 63-70



Tools for Meteorological Data Visualization

Isabel Harb Manssour, Carla Maria Dal Sasso Freitas e Dalcídio Moraes Claúdio

UFRGS-Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Instituto de Informática, Curso de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação - CPGCC

manssour@inf.ufrgs.br


Abstract:
Weather forecast centers usually deal with a great volume of complex multivariate data, which usually have to be interpreted within short time. Tools that use scientific visualization techniques can be a great help providing support for both daily forecasting and meteorological research. This work presents a collection of tools designed primarily to aid the daily tasks of meteorologists from the 8th Meteorological District, in the South of Brazil. The tasks of meteorologists and the classes of application data were observed to define tools requirements. System architecture and implementation follow a tool-oriented approach and the object-oriented programming paradigm, respectively. Current implementation provides mapping tools, that generate contour plots, icons maps, and a variety of graphs; recording tools, that allow to save and load images generated by the system; and a query tool, to read variables' values at selected meteorological stations.


Full Version:
in Acrobat PDF (179 Kb), and in Postscript gzipped (135 Kb)