Visualization Software from NAG Used in the World's Largest Climate Change Experiment

Click on any of the following images for a larger version.

Temperature. Long-term trends in surface temperature are the clearest indicator of climate changes.

Clouds & Surface. This computer model of Planet Earth simulates the atmosphere & ocean on a 3-D global grid.

Precipitation cells.

Helping to change the outlook of global warming.

March 2006. The world's leading provider of mathematical, statistical and visualization software, Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), is proud to be part of the largest online climate prediction experiment, Climateprediction.net, currently being promoted by the BBC. Climateprediction.net is a high-profile e-Science research experiment aimed at the accurate modeling of changes in the world's climate over the next fifty years. 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 visualization 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" [pdf], by J.P.R.B. Walton, D. Frame and D.A. Stainforth. Data Visualization 2004 (O. Deussen, C. Hansen, D. Keim and D. Saupe, eds.) pp 103-108. Eurographics Association, 2004.

Jeremy Walton, Visualization Technical Consultant at NAG said: "climateprediction.net recognized NAG's visualization 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. Visualization 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."

About IRIS Explorer from NAG

IRIS Explorer is NAG's powerful tool for developing customized visualization applications. Its visual programming environment enables you to develop, prototype and build these applications quickly and easily. IRIS Explorer, with its broad range of visualization techniques, from simple graphs to multidimensional animation, enables you to readily discern trends and relationships in your data.

IRIS Explorer is a standards-based package that utilizes 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 customized visualization applications. The extensive library of 'modules' (software routines) included puts a wide range of advanced visualization and analysis techniques at users' fingertips. Simply select modules from the library and connect them to interactively read and visualize data for analysis, presentation and publication.