This project is going to focus on meteorological information and the more realistic case of having discrete data that needs to be interpolated.We are going to focus on Illinois data in this assignment since Illinois is local, and Illinois is pretty flat which should make interpolation assumptions more valid. This assignment will deal with colour maps and contours and vectors and stream lines and streaklines.
This page gives you
access to several months worth of Illinois data for each of the
stations in a textual format:
http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/warm/datalist.asp
This page shows the
locations of the various stations both graphically and with
longitude and latitude values:
http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/warm/icnstationmap.asp
You should also find an appropriate state map (properly credited please) to be a backdrop for your data. You may want to have several different maps - for example one showing the locations of the weather stations, one showing cities, one showing counties, etc.
You will want to get the data for all of the stations for your month.
The data we are interested in visualizing is:
Rather than just visualizing the data at these stations, you should visualize it across the entire state at some reasonable level of resolution.
Given the scattering of the datasets around the state, interpolating this data will be very important. However there aren't stations at the corners of the state, so either you will need to extrapolate that data or you may want to search on the web and see if you can find some weather stations in neighbouring states to either use as data sources or to confirm your extrapolations.
You may need to write some code outside of vtk to massage the data before giving it to vtk.
Most of this data can be represented with colour maps, but one major focus of this assignment is on visualizing vector data such as wind direction. So this is the time to try out all those hedgehog and streamline routines. There are also opportunities to play with glyphs to combine various wind properties such as speed and direction together. You may also want to have a separate wind speed as a colour map. The idea is to come up with some interesting and useful visualizations of these various parameters.
Just FYI, here is a rather nice wind visualization that I came across on the web http://sfports.wr.usgs.gov/wind/streaklines.shtml for a rather complex geographic area. Illinois is (for the most part) a lot simpler. Unfortunately vtk doesn't have a streakline.
Since there are 12 students and 12 months in a year there seems to be a natural mapping there, so each student will visualize the data for a month, chosen below in order of final presentation. Note that you should be sure to should look at the data for all of the 12 months to be able to correctly set minimum and maximum values. Your visualization routines should work for any month not just the one that you are presenting.
| 1/2003 Jeong |
| 2/2003 Baldeva |
| 3/2003 Jagodic |
| 4/2003 Spale |
| 5/2003 Bell |
| 6/2003 Rao |
| 7/2003 Thompson |
| 8/2003 Luo |
| 9/2003 Luciano |
| 10/2003 McGirr |
| 11/2003 Singh |
| 12/2003 Nool |
Ideally you should be able to pick any day of the month and visualize the data for that month. However, you should pick at least 5 days to visualize. These should focus on interesting days if possible - maybe a storm moving through, or it gets really hot, or its really windy. You should also visualize a typical day for that month.
As with projects 1 and 2 you should create a web page containing a series of images showing all of these various features in action, and links to the code that you used to create them.