Integrated Visualization of Realtime Environmental Data

Abstract

This paper presents the visualization effort of the REINAS (Realtime Environmental Information Network Analysis System) project. REINAS is a continuing engineering research and development system with the goal of designing, developing and testing an operational prototype system for data acquisition, data management, and visualization. It includes a growing web of networked remote and in-situ instruments, a federated geographical database, and an extensible visualization interface. REINAS focuses on the needs of both oceanographers and meteorologists who monitor realtime data or analyze retrospective data. The visualization system of REINAS provides an integrated access via a distributed database to a host of different realtime data sources, numerical model forecasts, as well as more static data sets such as coastline and terrain information. It is designed as a modular tool-based system where users activate the appropriate visualization tools to generate different types of visualizatio..