Physical, chemical, and biological ocean processes play a crucial role in determining Earth's environment. Unfortunately, our knowledge of these processes is limited, since oceanography is carried out today largely the way it was a century ago: as expeditionary science, going to sea in ships and measuring a relatively small number of parameters (e.g., temperature, salinity, and pressure) as time and budget allow.
The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative is a US $330 million project that will help transform oceanography from a data poor to a data rich science. A cornerstone of this project is the deep water Regional Scale Nodes (RSN) that will be installed off the coasts of Washington and Oregon. The RSN will include 1500 km of fiber optic cable providing power and bandwidth to the seafloor and throughout the water column. Thousands of sensors will be deployed to stream data and imagery to shore, where they will be available in real-time for ocean scientists and the public at large.
The design of the RSN is a complex undertaking, requiring a combination of many different interactive tools and areas of visualization: geographic visualization to see the available seafloor bathymetry, scientific visualization to examine existing geospatially located datasets, layout tools to place the sensors, and collaborative tools to communicate across the team during the design. COVE, the Common Observatory Visualization Environment, is a visualization environment designed to meet all these needs. COVE has been built by computer scientists working closely with the engineering and scientific teams who will build and use the RSN.
Below are some screenshots from the tool carrying out various activities for the observatory design and instructions on how to download the software if you want to take a closer look. It works on both Windows and Mac and on the help menu you can find rudimentary documentation and a quick start section for taking a look at the features.
| On a Windows system, click on the Windows Installer to install COVE. Double click on the COVE icon placed on your desktop or the one in your Start menu. | |
| On a Mac, click on the Mac Zip File to download and then drag the cove folder from your downloads to the desktop. Launch the application by double clicking on the COVE application in the cove folder. If during the download you get a warning that the folder contains an application, that's expected. | |
| It may take a long time to start up based on your internet connection since many files are downloaded the first time you run the application. |
Please send any comments or questions to keithg@cs.washington.edu or mstorm@u.washington.edu.