Corpus Christi Bay Dashboard
Overview
The Corpus Christi Bay dashboard is a form of a virtual observatory (VO) that provides an environment where research, science and environmental monitoring meet multiple public communities. These diverse communities include both technical and non-technical users who are interested in and want to engage in the process of scientific analysis. The virtual observatory offers users, stakeholders, policy-makers and interested public members a real-time view of data from monitoring sensors and analysis systems through a common web browser. The dashboard provides its user an intuitive user interface with information about key environmental conditions such as water oxygen levels and temperatures and provides the ability to deep dive into the data and analysis results. The information is available at-a-glance and is easy to use with simple interactions between the visualization and the stakeholder.The dashboard consists of four distinct views which show real-time and historical data for the entire environmental system, coupled with methods for filtering the information for extreme values or particular locations. The dashboard is being built using the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Digital Synthesis Explorer (DSE) and is driven by Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and file inputs served by an underlying workflow-driven web service enabled by NCSA’s CyberIntegratorCyberintegrator workflow tool. The workflow queries the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) Hydology Information Services and produces derived summary data that is visualized. The efficacy of this visualization is being formally evaluated within the WATERS Network testbed for Corpus Christi Bay, Texas, an environmental system which experiences seasonal hypoxia.
The Technology
The Dashboard is implemented with free/open source software and NCSA software.
Open Source
NCSA
Team Members
- Luigi Marini, NCSA
- Andrew Collier, U of I, CEE
- Rob Kooper, NCSA
- Barbara Minsker, U of I, CEE
Collaborations & Communities
- Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science
- WATERS Network testbed for Corpus Christi Bay
Publications and Presentations:
- Dashboard Visualization for Diverse User Communities. A Collier, L Marini, B Minsker. (2008). Poster presented at AGU 2008 Fall Meeting. San Francisco, CA. December 15-19, 2008.