Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is a Java™-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. The IDV release includes a library and a reference application made from that software. It is based on VisAD (http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/visad.html), an open-source, Java library for building interactive and collaborative visualization and analysis tools, as well as other Java-based utility packages.
The IDV is being developed at the Unidata Program Center (UPC), part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, under funding provided by the National Science Foundation. The software is freely available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The IDV brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data (for example, numerical weather prediction model output), surface observations (METARs), upper air soundings, NWS NEXRAD Level II and Level III RADAR data, NOAA National Profiler Network data and GIS data, all within a unified interface. The IDV "reference application" provides many of the standard 2-D data displays that other Unidata packages (e.g. GEMPAK and McIDAS) provide. It also provides 3-D views of the atmosphere and allows users to interactively slice, dice, and probe the data, creating cross-sections, profiles, animations and value read-outs of multi-dimensional data sets. Computations and displays of built-in and user-supplied formula-based derived quantities are supported. A feature unique to the IDV is an integrated HTML display that can be used to create HTML-based users' interfaces to drive the displays. You can also embed fully-interactive 2D and 3D IDV displays in HTML documents, when viewed with the IDV. The IDV User's Guide describes the IDV reference application. The IDV software library can be easily be used and extended to create custom geoscience applications beyond the atmospheric science realm. This customization allows new applications to be tailored to specific datasets and provide customized user interfaces for different tasks. One example of a specialized IDV application is the GEON IDV (http://geon.unavco.org/unavco/IDV_for_GEON.html)