Oregon State Researchers Use PV-WAVE® to Visualize the Ocean

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  • Environmental analysis
  • Accurate animation of data
In Corvallis, Oregon, animated movies of one of the world's greatest natural wonders, the Pacific Ocean, are being made. However, the movies are being made by researchers rather than entertainers. At Oregon State University's College of Oceanography, these researchers are working on a project that observes and models the ocean's dynamics.

"We are interested in producing accurate animations of several of our data sets, such as sea-surface temperature patterns, wind stress and currents," said Brett Barksdale, an Oregon State researcher who works for Dr. Mark Abbott. "We want to develop something that shows how these things interact together at certain times and places."

From space, a satellite provides the researchers with enormous amounts of information every time it completes an orbit. Barksdale and his team benefited from having all this information but found the "sifting through" process was hindering their work, and it was difficult to take megabyte-upon-megabyte of data and present them in a compact and understandable manner.

Eventually, they turned to Visual Numeric's visual data analysis package, PV-WAVE, for help.

"One of PV-WAVE's most underrated features is its I/O routines. They are efficient, simple to learn and make it easy to handle just about any data format," Barksdale said. "This was essential for us as we used PV-WAVE to quickly load in and sort through large amounts of data."

Oregon State's process begins when PV-WAVE loads the large chunks of satellite-gathered data. Through PV-WAVE's display capabilities, researchers receive a quick analysis of areas of interest. Images, specifically those taken nearby in time, are then animated with PV-WAVE. This allows a quick and effective look at how the system evolves.

When a sizable number of useful images are found, they are set aside in a custom PV-WAVE save file. This allows PV-WAVE's built-in functions and procedures to break down the time series of images into their principal components.

These components can be used to recreate an approximation of the system at any given state of time -- not just when the raw satellite images were taken. This is crucial for producing an animation of the system, in time, in which each of the movie's frames are evenly spaced.

While this is done, other researchers are using PV-WAVE to view different data sets that pertain to the area under observation within the satellite images. Some of these data sets might be wind stress measurements over the ocean or the location of surface drifters released into the sea at the start of the observation.

PV-WAVE's display capabilities allow the easy overlaying of these data sets onto the reconstructed satellite images. Once created, these combined frames are saved in a PV-WAVE save file for playback at the researcher's convenience.

Analyzing these data as a movie, the researcher can view the evolution over time -- thus seeing how the surface drifters follow certain patterns within the ocean (satellite) images or how the ocean responds to wind stress or any number of variable relationships.

"PV-WAVE is a major tool in our production," Barksdale said. "Everything that ends up in our animation videos has been loaded, viewed, poked, prodded and tweaked in PV-WAVE until we were satisfied with it. PV-WAVE definitely makes our work a lot easier."