POSTER

Title: VISAGE Framework for Interactive Exploration of Diverse Precipitation Data
Presenting Author: Helen Conover
Organization: University of Alabama in Huntsville
Co-Author(s): Todd Berendes, Lihua Wang, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Abdelhak Marouane, Brian Ellingson, Patrick Gatlin, Manil Maskey, Aaron Naeger, Stephanie Wingo

Abstract:
Diverse airborne and ground-based environmental observations are important technologies for atmospheric and precipitation science research, disaster assessment and response, as well as for the validation of environmental satellite observations and atmospheric models which can improve forecasts. There is a need within the Earth Science community for a tool that brings together such diverse datasets and facilitates qualitative as well as quantitative analysis (i.e., not simply visualization), within a common framework. VISAGE (Visualization for Integrated Satellite, Airborne, and Ground-based data Exploration) helps researchers quickly locate interesting weather phenomena using 4-dimensional visualization of weather processes and structures in an interactive user interface. The VISAGE framework enables intercomparison of data from multiple sources (i.e., airborne, ground, model), both visually and statistically. Proof-of-concept use cases are centered around the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission's Ground Validation (GV) program, which provides a wealth of intensive, coincident observations of atmospheric phenomena from a wide variety of ground-based, airborne and satellite instruments. These data have diverse temporal and spatial scales, variables, and data formats and organization. The VISAGE's data framework stores this wide variety of data in an analysis ready form with a common query interface.