ClimatePipes: User-Friendly Data Access, Manipulation, Analysis & Visualization of Community Climate Models and Geospatial Datasets

Recently, we (Kitware & NYU Poly) presented ClimatePipes at the AGU Fall Meeting 2013 and received very positive feedback from the community. The overarching goals of ClimatePipes are:

– Enable users to explore real-world questions related to climate change.

– Provide open source tools for data access, analysis, and visualization.

– Facilitate collaboration by enabling users to share datasets, workflows, and visualization.

ClimatePipes uses a web-based application platform for its widespread support on mainstream operating systems, ease-of-use, and inherent collaboration support. The front-end of ClimatePipes uses HTML5 (WebGL, Canvas2D, CSS3) to deliver state-of-the-art visualization and to provide a best-in-class user experience. The back-end of the ClimatePipes is built around Python using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK, http://vtk.org), Climate Data Analysis Tools (CDAT, http://uv-cdat.llnl.gov), and other climate and geospatial data processing tools such as GDAL and PROJ4. As part of the ClimatePipes project we have developed VGL (WebGL based renderer), GeoJS (Geo-visualization library), and PyGeo (Data processing and compute backend in python for geosciences).

Here’s a video that highlights some of the features of ClimatePipes:

Here is the link to the project repository on github: https://github.com/OpenGeoscience.  

As always, we are open for suggestions and ideas for improvements and welcome any contributions from the community.  

Project Team: Berk Geveci, Aashish Chaudhary, Dave DeMarle, Chris Harris (Kitware); Claudio Silva, Ben Burnett, Daniel Kohler Osmari, Darshan Pandit (NYU Poly) 

* ClimatePipes is funded by Department of Energy (DE-SC0006493).