Performance and Progress Report - John Doe FIX: put in the authors ...

papers on, and demos of this technology have been presented at both scientific and policy
meetings.
This past year, several improvements have been made to the whale tracking software
including:
1) The addition of tools to convert EK60 data to GeoZui4D's existing
curtain plot format. Two channels are combined using different
colors to show how the intensity returns vary between channels.
2) The addition of the ability to display on-screen depth, position and
altitude information. When a whale is displayed over bathymetry,
an on-screen numeric display of its position, depth and height of
the bottom can be shown. This answers the most common
questions asked by scientists who are studying whale behavior
using GeoZui-4D.
3) Incorporation of DTAG data into GeoZui-4D and the dynamic
synchronization of the visualization with specific behavioral
sequences.
Ware has also developed and applied tools (Trackplot) for the analysis of whale behavior.
New analyses of tracking data collected in 2005 reveals consistency in heading of the
whales during side-roles. It is hypothesized that this has to do with the orientation of
sand-waves on the bottom. These analyses have also resulted in the classification of a
catalogue of hitherto unknown humpback whale behaviors. Visualizations from the
Center have appeared in a variety of media and these visualizations are credited with
getting continued ship time on the NOAA Ship, NANCY FOSTER for an additional three
years. Center visualizations have also been used in numerous hearings on the potential
location of offshore natural gas terminals.
Flow Visualization:
The incorporation of flow visualization models into the GeoZui4D environment has
opened of a range of applications and interest from ocean and current modelers both
inside and outside of NOAA. Our goal is to provide tools that allow both researchers and
members of the public to better understand the output from flow models. This is
important to NOAA because of the increase in the number and quality of global, ocean,
and estuarine flow models. These models are becoming critical to interpreting and
generalizing physical oceanographic data, understanding marine ecologies, understanding
weather and climate prediction. The flow visualization work is being carried out by
graduate student Quinn, in collaboration with Ware; partial funding for this work has also
been provided by NSF. Ware is also building the beginnings of a new flow visualization
package to deal with sigma coordinate models. He is working closely with NOAA (and
other) modelers and currently the new visualization package can load data from the
following models:
� Cbofs (Chesapeake Bay)
� Gbofs (Galveston Harbor)
JHC Performance Report 37 30 January 2007