[IDV #KVK-267436]: Using IDV as an image generator

> IDV Support Team,
> 
> My name is Mark Staroska, I'm a software engineer working at the Air Force 
> Weather Agency (AFWA). I work on a team that develops Java plugin software to 
> FalconView (http://www.falconview.org/trac/FalconView) that retrieves and 
> displays weather data from many sources, including acquiring gridded binary 
> data from Weather Data Analysis (WDA). We use either 1.0 degree or 0.5 degree 
> GFS or various resolution WRF models depending on what operational theater we 
> are near.
> 
> We are surveying tools to visualize GRIB files within FalconView, so that 
> flight mission planners may quickly see what (for example) winds, or icing, 
> or turbulence are going to be like over the route they are planning. We are 
> also interested in visualizing winds to allow planners to plan routes that 
> reduce fuel consumption and to allow more precise air drops. Along with IDV, 
> we are also looking at McIDAS-V, VisAD, NASA's WorldWind application, or 
> perhaps a home-grown solution using netCDF ourselves directly.
> 
> Now obviously we don't want to reinvent the wheel. One of the first tenets of 
> writing software is that there's always someone smarter out there that's 
> already done it. The IDV UI seems to have all the tools we need, the ability 
> to process grib data, already supports derived conditions, and has very 
> impressive in-UI rendering.  We'd like to do all of that, but without the UI.
> 
> Is there a way to directly use the IDV jar to headlessly generate and write 
> imagery to disk from within another application? I see in the documentation 
> ways to use ISL scripts while IDV runs in an offscreen mode, but we'd like to 
> just use the java library. Is this possible, and have you ever heard of 
> anyone trying this before? Is there documentation or examples anywhere that 
> explain how we could do this?
> 

Hi Mark,
       It is not clear to me when you mentioned headlessly. In the real 
headless environment, you can use the Xvfb or xvnc to run the IDV jar file, but 
this is not the most efficient way. 
       In a normal desktop environment (with good video card), a few powful 
users have been running the IDV to generate images for operation usage. The 
benchmark we have from our user is that IDV can generate over 1000 images in 
less than 6 minutes. This is under IDV scripting language (ISL). The detail 
information of ISL is available in 
our training document:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/docs/workshop/toc.html#index.html



Let us know if you need more help.

Yuan

> Thanks so much for your time and any help you can provide.
> 
> For your info, CC'd is Kyle Baardson, the project lead for the software 
> project plugin in question (FalconView Weather).
> 
> V/R,
> Mark Staroska
> HQ AFWA/SEMS
> 
> 
> 


Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: KVK-267436
Department: Support IDV
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed