Web enabled collaborative climate visualization in the Earth System Grid

The recent advances in high performance computing, storage and networking technologies have enabled fundamental changes in current climate research. While sharing datasets and results is already common practice in climate modeling, direct sharing of the analysis and visualization process is also becoming feasible. We report our efforts to develop a capability, coupled with the Earth system grid (ESG), for sharing an entire executable workspace of visualization among collaborators. Evolutionary history of visualizations of research findings can also be captured and shared. The data intensive nature of the visualization system requires using several advanced techniques of visualization and parallel computing. With visualization clients implemented through standard Web browsers, however, the ensuing complexity is made transparent to end-users. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using cutting edge climate datasets.