The climate model visualization project, Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT), has just released its beta version (UV-CDAT 1.0.0) to the public.

Developed by partnering with the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) and the community to create a larger problem-solving environment, UV-CDAT is an open-source, easy-to-use application that links together disparate software subsystems and packages to form an integrated environment for analysis and visualization. The release of UV-CDAT 1.0.0 will greatly enhance manipulation and analysis of large and complex datasets, beginning with climate model output such as the datasets at Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the ESGF, but with potential for a much broader application. Since its alpha release in February, over 600 users have logged its use.

Goals for the UV-CDAT project are ambitious, with emphasis placed on building an open framework to allow communication and interoperability between disparate analysis and visualization packages through appropriate application programming interfaces. In order to build such a system, a diverse community of climate scientists, computer scientists and mathematicians will enable commonly used software tools such as CDAT, VisTrails, ParaView, VisIt, DV3D, and R under one charge. The UV-CDAT project aims to advance climate science by fulfilling computational and diagnostic/visualization capabilities needed for the Department of Energy's climate research. Participation in UV-CDAT includes researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Kitware Inc., Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Instructions on how to download and install UV-CDAT 1.0.0 can be found at http://uv-cdat.llnl.gov/install/.