Estuarine And Coastal Interactive Visualization System Based On The Idl Preliminary Study

ViSC(Visualization in Scientific Computing) is an important method in estuarine and coastal research. It helps us improve the efficiency of data process, and deepen the understanding of phenomena. This paper introduces ViSC technology into estuarine and coastal research, and tries the secondary development of estuarine and coastal interactive visualization system, and therefore has great importance of realistic and applied value.This paper analyzes the characteristic of estuarine and coastal research, compares the related achievements both domestic and abroad, points out the defect of current research, including the weakness of lack of optimization in specialized research, incompleteness of secondary development, lack of interactivity and cross-platform capabilities, and thus proposes the solution which utilizes advanced visualization specialized software platforms to perform the secondary development, and considers the design of system functions of visualization result and interactivity with users, which makes the system multi-purpose with convenient operations. This paper compares the characteristic of different visualization development platforms, and picks IDL (Interactive Data Language) as the platform of estuarine and coastal visualization application, and independently develops the "East China Sea Tide and Tidal-Current Interactive Visualization System", the work covers the system requirement analysis, functioa design, UI (User-Interface) design, numerical calculation module integration, and achieves different types of visualization of numerical simulation result of 3-dimesional space tide and tidal current in a certain period of time.The system has following advantages: 1) Strong interactivity. By utilizing a set of GUI widgets in IDL, users are able to set calculation parameters and make any changes to the visualized result very easily. 2) Cross-platform portability. IDL is perfectly supported by all the popular operating systems; therefore the system developed on IDL can also have this characteristic. 3) Easy to spread. With the new IDL VM free-license mechanism, the system is easy to spread among different users which also contribute to the enhancement of system functions.