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.
| To install COVE on your system you can download the Window Version or the Mac Version depending on your system. They are identical except for the application file. If during the download you get a warning that the folder contains an application, that's fine. The README.txt file contains further information for installation and on reporting problems you may have. | |
| Launch the application by double clicking on the COVE application in the folder. It will take a while to start up as files are downloaded. |
Please send any comments or questions to keithg@cs.washington.edu or mstorm@u.washington.edu.