Querying and Visualizing Gridded Datasets for e-Science

Bill Howe, David Maier

Abstract: We demonstrate a Web service and client application for querying and visualizing datasets defined over a topological grid structure. The context for our interest in gridded datasets is CORIE, an environmental observation and forecasting system designed to support scientific and industrial interests in the Columbia River estuary. The CORIE system both measures and simulates the physical properties of the estuary, generating 5GB of data and thousands of data products for each simulation run, including visualizations, aggregated results and derived datasets. In the current production CORIE system, "canned" visualizations are produced eagerly for every run. Users cannot customize their data products nor access the data directly, inhibiting data sharing. The term e-science is used to connote global, distributed collaboration enabled by sharing of both data and compute resources.