New Media Research Institute

The DIAL NO2 Data Desktop Explorer is an outcome of the NASA funded DIAL ACCESS Project (NNX06AB08A).

DATA Resources: Courtesy of NASA and the EPA

DATA Resource Services: Courtesy of NASA AURA Science team at Goddard, and the DATAFed REASON project.

Viewer Programming in IDL and Lingo/JavaScript: Martin Landsfeld

User Interface Design: Bruce Caron and Martin Landsfeld

User Interface Graphics: Hajime Narahara

User Interface Usabillity: Bruce Caron

The Explorer was built at the New Media Research Center of the New Media Studio in Santa Barbara, CA.

The Data Desktop Explorer uses Data from NASA and the EPA.

The OMI NO2 data sets are from the NASA Goddard OMI science team:

EOS Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) OMNO2 Level 3 Data

The EPA AQS datasets are from the DataFed service:

AQS_H

Information about these datasets are available from the websites listed above.

Started July 4, the Zaca fire burned for nearly two months before it was contained on September 2, 2007. Nearby Santa Barbara City residents watched and waited while this, the largest fire in the history of the county (240,207 acres total), moved ever closer to the inhabited front country. As firefighters battled, NASA's MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program captured the active burn area several times a day. At the end of August, with towering heat clouds in the sky and ash covering the ground in Santa Barbara City, ACCESS DIAL project technical lead, Marty Landsfeld, noticed satellite data images in the local papers and determined that an animation of the progression of the fire would help inform the population. In one afternoon, using the DIAL technology, he was able to assemble an animation of 104 MODIS data images, including their date and time information. On August 28, the Zaca Fire NASA Data Animation was hosted on the web at NASA Zaca fire data animation.

The New Media Research Institute is proud to collaborate with ITT Visual Information Solutions to build the tools that educators nationwide can use to develop data literacy in the United States. With key funding by NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and NASA Earth System Science, NMRI uses it's IDL-based authoring tools to develop software for education in a wide variety of settings outside the usual research laboratory setting where IDL is found.

You can read about this effort on the ITT Visual Information Solutions website:
IDL Donations Help Foster Early Interest in Scientific Data Exploration

On April 11, 2007, Bruce Caron gave a presentation on the DIAL technology at the Education and Outreach Colloquium of the Earth Sciences Division at GSFC. Simultaneously webcast, the presentation walked the audience through the advantages of using DIAL for data-rich application development.
The talk presentation is now on the GSFC website:
Education and Outreach Colloquium, Bruce Caron

You can link directly to the presentation (as a PDF file) here:

March 2004
For this project to create interactive Java-based software products, the Institute will be working on a new effort to automate the pedagogical evaluation of learning software through the development of "evaluation layers" that can be programmed by education experts to test the users on their knowledge before and after the use of the software. The Institute is working on a subcontract with the University of Wisconsin, and will be subcontracting educational content development in the area of marine ecology to UCSB's Marine Science Institute and PISCO project.

March 2004
The Studio will be creating a new IDL interfaces for the OPENdap project. These will connect the entire OPENdap community to resources and other information about this distributed data access effort. The work is through a subcontract with OPENdap and the University of Rhode Island.