Overview of IVE

IVE (Interactive Visualization Environment) is a software package designed to interactively display and analyze gridded data. IVE assumes the data to be displayed are contained in one-, two-, three- or four-dimensional arrays. By default, the numbers within these arrays are assumed to represent grid point values of some field variable (such as pressure) on a rectangular evenly spaced grid. IVE is, nevertheless, capable of displaying data on arbitrary curvilinear grids.

If the data points are not evenly spaced on a rectangular grid, IVE must be informed of the grid structure, either by specifying "attributes" in the data input or by specifying the coordinate transform in a user supplied subroutine. Stretched rectangular grids (which occur when the stretching along a given coordinate is a function only of the value of that coordinate) can be accommodated by specifying one-dimensional arrays containing the grid-point locations along the stretched coordinate as part of the IVE input data. Staggered meshes can also be accommodated by setting "attributes" in the input data. The structure of more complicated curvilinear grids must be communicated to IVE via user supplied "transforms," which define the mapping between physical space and the array indices.

Since four-dimensional data cannot be directly displayed on a flat computer screen, it is necessary to reduced the dimensionality of the data before it is displayed. One of IVE's primary capabilities involves dimension reduction or "data slicing." IVE allows the user to display lower-dimensional subsets of the data by fixing a coordinate or by averaging over the coordinate.

IVE currently has the capability to display

• scalar fields as
  • 2D scalar plots
  • 1D scalar plots
  • vertical soundings
  • a single point value
• vector fields as 2D vector plots

IVE lets you overlay plots, loop plots, and control a wide variety of display parameters.

IVE also can perform algebraic computations on the gridded data and can calculate derivatives. More complicated computations can be performed in user supplied subroutines.