Reconstruction of sampled and modeled oceanographic information using an exploratory environment

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) Department of Defense (DoD) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) operates as a DoD shared high performance computing (HPC) center, serving over 2000 users nationwide. Scientific visualization is an essential element of HPC that provides the methodology to explore, define, and present the results of computations. Accurate and understandable representation of data impacts a project in several ways: it helps scientists understand the physical phenomena they are studying, it helps communicate this work to their colleagues, and it helps explain the work and its significance to the public. Our scientific visualization team, in conjunction with researchers at our facility and other DoD facilities, have accomplished numerous visualizations of large data sets. In this paper we present examples of the methods, techniques, and results of our efforts to visualize observational data and the output of numeric ocean models