VAPOR

"VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers.  VAPOR provides an interactive 3D visualization environment that can also produce animations and still frame images.  VAPOR runs on most UNIX and Windows systems equipped with modern 3D graphics cards.

The VAPOR Data Collection (VDC) data model allows users progressively access the fidelity of their data, allowing for the visualization of terascale data sets on commodity hardware.  VAPOR can also directly import data formats including WRF, MOM, POP, ROMS, and some GRIB and NetCDF files.
Users can perform ad-hoc analysis with VAPOR's interactive Python interpreter; which allows for the creation, modification, and visualization of new variables based on input model data.

A fundamental capability, and one of the driving requirements behind much of VAPOR's design, is the ability for users to interactively explore large, time-varying, gridded data sets using only desktop (e.g commodity laptop or PC) computing resources. This feat is accomplished through the use of a progressive access data model; when selecting a variable to operate on in the VAPOR environment the user specifies not only the name of the variable, a time step, and possibly a spatial region of interest (ROI), but also provides a quality parameter. This quality parameter enables  the user to trade speed for accuracy. Lower quality levels can be processed more quickly, but the resulting analysis operation, such as volume rendering, may suffer from visual artifacts. Likewise, higher quality levels will produce more accurate results, but may take longer (and require more computing resources). This model is similar to the one employed by the ubiquitous GoogleEarth; when the user is viewing an area from far above the earth a low resolution image is displayed, but as the user zooms in closer higher, and higher resolution images are used.

Unfortunately, to get the most benefit out of a progressive access data scheme requires an underlying data format that supports progressive access. Commonly used scientific data formats such as netCDF or HDF have no such provision. Hence, VAPOR provides its own scientific data format supporting progressive access, the VAPOR Data Collection (VDC). To take advantage of VAPOR's large data handling ability a data set must first be converted into a VDC. Numerous methods are available for performing this conversion and are discussed here.

VAPOR is not a general purpose visualiztion application. It is a targeted tool, aimed primarily at the specialized needs of the earth and space science communities, particularly in numerical weather prediction, numerically simulated turbulence, and ocean modeling. Though VAPOR offers many general purpose visualization algorithms such as volume rendering and isosurfaces, VAPOR also provides many features not found in more general scientific visualization packages, such as support for geo-referenced data. Another particular emphasis in VAPOR is the ability to explore time varying flow fields.

VAPOR is intended to help domain scientists explore, analyze, and interpet their gridded data sets through visualization aided analysis. VAPOR provides a rich set of powerfull, quick-look advanced 3D visualization techniques that enable a qualitative understanding of complex phenomena, and are adept at helping identify spatial or temporal regions of interest.  Once an interesting region or feature is identified visually, more detailed, quantitative analysis can be performed. While VAPOR provides a degree of quantitative information, often more capable, mathematically oriented tools are needed (e.g MatLab, NumPy, or IDL). In this case VAPOR can help focus the direction of these more quantitatively-oriented tools."

https://www.vapor.ucar.edu/

Installation Notes

The binaries installed in the binary version 2.6.0.RC0 are:

amr_ex                                                                                                  
asciitf2vtf -  Convert an ASCII description of a Lookup Transfer table to VAPOR's vtf format
cam2vdf  - Transform CAM netCDF data into a VDC
camvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a CAM data set
cart2layer -  Insert a Cartesian-gridded variable into a layered VDC
flashamr2vdf - Transform Flash AMR hdf5 data into a VDC
flashvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a Flash AMR data set
getWMSImage.sh - Retrieve maps and imagery from a Web Mapping Server
grib2vdf - Transform GRIB data into a VDC
gribvdfcreate -  Generate a VDF metadata file for a GRIB data set
mom2vdf - Transform MOM or POP netCDF data into a VDC
momvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a MOM or POP data set
ncdf2vdf - Transform netCDF data into a VDC
ncdfvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a NetCDF data set
patchelf -
python
raw2vdf - Transform a raw data volume into a VDC
roms2vdf - Transform ROMS netCDF data into a VDC
romsvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a ROMS data set
tiff2geotiff - Insert georeferencing and dates into a tiff file
vaporgui
vapor-setup.csh
vapor-setup.sh
vaporversion
vdcwizard - GUI program to walk a user through the steps of converting a dataset to VDC format
vdf2raw - Inverse transform a field variable found in a VDC and store the results in a file.
vdfbkup.pl - Create a backup of a VAPOR Data Collection
vdfcp.pl - Copy a vdf dataset, either partially or entirely
vdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file
vdfedit - Edit the contents of a VAPOR .vdf file
vdfls - List directory contents of a VAPOR Data Collection
wrf2vdf - Transform WRF netCDF data into a VDC
wrfvdfcreate - Generate a VDF metadata file for a WRF data set