GWVis : A Tool for Comparative Ground-Water Data

12 The Ground-Water Visualization application (GWVis) presents ground-water 13 data visually in order to educate the public on ground-water issues. It is 14 also intended for presentations to government and other funding agencies. 15 GWVis works with ground-water level elevation data collected or modeled 16 over a given time span, together with a matching fixed underlying terrain. 17 GWVis was developed using the Python programming language in con18 junction with associated extension packages and application program inter19 faces such as OpenGLto improve performance and allow us fine control of 20 attributes of the model such as lighting, material properties, transformations, 21 and interpolation. 22 There are currently several systems available for visualizing ground-water 23 data. We classify these into two categories: research-oriented models and 24 static presentation-based models. While both of them have their strengths, 25 we find the former overly complex and non-intuitive and the latter not en26 gaging and presenting problems showing multiple data dimensions. 27 GWVis bridges the gap between static and research based visualizations 28 by providing an intuitive, interactive design that allows participants to view 29 the model from different perspectives, infer information about simulations, 30 and view a comparison of two datasets. By incorporating scientific data in an 31 environment that can be easily understood, GWVis allows that information 32 to be presented to a large audience base. 33 ∗Corresponding author Email addresses: [email protected] (Daniel M. Best) Tel: 509-372-6728 Fax: 509-375-4933 Preprint submitted to Computers & Geosciences February 8, 2011