GWVis: A tool for comparative ground-water data visualization

The Ground-Water Visualization application (GWVis) presents ground-water data visually in order to educate the public on ground-water issues. It is also intended for presentations to government and other funding agencies. GWVis works with ground-water level elevation data collected or modeled over a given time span, together with a matching fixed underlying terrain. was developed using the Python programming language in conjunction with associated extension packages and application program interfaces such as OpenGLTM to improve performance and allow us fine control of attributes of the model such as lighting, material properties, transformations, and interpolation. are currently several systems available for visualizing ground-water data. We classify these into two categories: research-oriented models and static presentation-based models. While both of them have their strengths, we find the former overly complex and non-intuitive and the latter not engaging and presenting problems showing multiple data dimensions. bridges the gap between static and research based visualizations by providing an intuitive, interactive design that allows participants to view the model from different perspectives, infer information about simulations, and view a comparison of two datasets. By incorporating scientific data in an environment that can be easily understood, GWVis allows that information to be presented to a large audience base.