Climateprediction is a high-profile e-science research experiment aimed at the accurate modelling of changes in the world's climate over the next 50 years
Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), is part of the largest online climate prediction experiment, Climateprediction, currently being promoted by the BBC.
Thousands of participants all over the world have downloaded the project's climate simulator and are running it using the spare capacity of their desktop PCs.
NAG developed the real-time desktop visualisation component of the experiment for its launch in 2003, thus enabling users to track the progress of their simulation as cloud cover and temperature changes over the surface of the globe.
A technical paper describing this work was presented at the 2004 Eurographics/IEEE TCVG Visualization Symposium and has been published as: 'Visualization for public-resource climate modeling', by JPRB Walton, D Frame and DA Stainforth in Data Visualization 2004 pp 103-108, Eurographics Association, 2004.
Jeremy Walton, visualisation technical consultant at NAG said: "Climateprediction recognised NAG's visualisation expertise at the start of the project, and as a result, we developed the desktop display component for the package that has since been downloaded onto thousands of desktops.
"Visualisation plays an important role in climateprediction.net, since it gives users an insight into the progress of their simulation, as well as providing images for the print and broadcast media, who helped with encouraging wider public participation in the project".
Iris Explorer is NAG's tool for developing customised visualisation applications.
Its visual programming environment enables userz to develop, prototype and build these applications quickly and easily.
Iris Explorer, with its broad range of visualisation techniques, from simple graphs to multidimensional animation, enables users to readily discern trends and relationships in data.
Iris Explorer is a standards-based package that utilises the Open Inventor, ImageVision and OpenGL libraries, together with NAG's world-class numerical libraries.
It is available on a broad range of Windows PC, Unix and Linux platforms.
Its easy to use point-and-click interface means that users spend less time programming and developing customised visualisation applications.
The extensive library of 'modules' (software routines) included puts a wide range of advanced visualisation and analysis techniques at users' fingertips.
Simply select modules from the library and connect them to interactively read and visualise data for analysis, presentation and publication.
