Charles Finley, a research associate professor in the Univeristy of North Carolina School of Medicine, leads a team that uses high performance computing and advanced visualization tools to improve the design and application of cochlear implants. These implants can restore hearing in people with profound hearing losses enough to restore functional speech understanding of speech and other sounds. A receiver on the exterior of the skull collects sound and passes electric impulses to the implant, which generates electric impulses to stimulate nerve cells in the inner ear.

As a RENCI Faculty Fellow, Finley worked with the RENCI visualization team at RENCI’s UNC Chapel Hill engagement center, using simulation and visualization to improve the effectiveness of cochlear implants. Visualization and simulation were used to develop patient-specific models that determine the best positioning of electrode contacts in the implant in order to take advantage of the patient’s functioning neurons. The models also will provide insight into the electrical stimulation process that occurs in the cochlea as a result of implants, which could impact the design and fitting of future implant devices.

Visualizations done early during the collaboration with Finley helped discover bugs and anomalies in the data sets. As the project progressed, visualizations helped to understand how the positioning of the implant probe affects the resulting electrical field, and thus affects how well the patient is able to hear.

Credits:
Data Visualization: David Borland and Eric Knisley, RENCI
Data simulation: Charles Finley, UNC School of Medicine, and Mark Reed, RENCI/UNC Chapel Hill.

More information:
RENCI Cochlear Implant project: http://www.renci.org/focus-areas/biosciences-medicine/cochlear-implant-studies
Charles Finley: http://www.med.unc.edu/ent/faculty/research-faculty-1/charles-c-finley-phd

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

Alan Huber spent an entire career with the US Environmental Protection Agency studying how pollutants disperse on the wind through urban environments.

The question is tricky and important to understanding urban air quality and how particulates disperse, whether they are the pollens, dust, and carbon monoxide fumes that are constantly carried through the urban environment, accidental emissions of pollutants, or emissions caused by anything from fires to building demolitions. Airflow is complicated by urban geography; narrow streets lined with skyscrapers and smaller buildings prevent air currents from moving uniformly across the cityscape and cause updrafts and downdrafts.

Since retiring from the EPA in 2007, Huber, now an adjunct faculty member with the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has continued his research with help from RENCI visualization specialists and the computing power of UNC’s Topsail, a 520-node (4,160 processor) supercomputing cluster with a peak performance of nearly 29 teraflop/s.

“I’m interested in the micro-environments in urban areas; how particles disperse at a spatial scale of about one meter,” Huber said. “Direct simulation of this kind of process has only been possible for a few years.”

Simulations of such detailed movement of particles through real environments requires using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), numerical methods and algorithms that solve and analyze problems involving flows of fluids and gases over complex surfaces. The work is extremely computationally intensive: Huber used between 128 and 512 processors on Topsail for a series of compute jobs over several months in 2007.  After simulating his data, he turned to RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill, then a new resource on the UNC campus, to translate the data into a more intuitive format for study. “I had thousands of gigabytes of data, but I wanted to be able to interact with it and look at in three dimensions over time,” explained Huber.

Enter David Borland, a senior visualization researcher at RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill. Borland began working with Huber to turn his massive dataset into three- dimensional visualizations showing airflow over time among the buildings of lower Manhattan and how particles travel along these wind currents. Huber’s full 54 million-cell dataset was too large to visualize interactively, so the team took a smaller geographical area, including such landmarks as Madison Square Garden and the Empire State Building, and began building a visualization that shows airflow over two-to-five hours in five-minute time steps.

Huber, whose past work includes simulating particle dispersion caused by the collapse of the north tower of the World Trade Center, said the current lower Manhattan visualization interests homeland security experts who want to be prepared for possible terrorist attacks involving airborne particles. Its relevance also extends to environmental engineers, urban planners, political leaders and others who need to understand how new buildings, traffic patterns and other variables affect air quality and, by extension, public health.

Recently, Borland and Huber ported the airflow simulation to the high resolution, stereoscopic tele-immersion system at RENCI, where they can view it in three dimensions and at street level. Next the team plans to visualize the entire dataset and run visualizations in RENCI’s dome environment. Using the dome, said Borland, will create an immersive experience, where the researchers can look in any direction, even over their shoulders, and see the particle flow.

“If you’ve spent some time in a city, you know the wind will be in your face and then a half of a block down it’ll be at your back due to the influence of buildings,” said Huber.  “We want to create that real experience as much as possible.”

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

The Bistro is free and includes lunch on a first-come, first-served basis. RENCI experts, Eric Knisley, 3D visualization researcher, and Josh Coyle, new media specialist, will demonstrate how RENCI is using new digital technologies and visualization techniques to communicate scientific, educational and general information. Three-dimensional visualizations created for the dome environment and interactive touchscreen displays are among the new media tools the pair will show. Attendees will observe a brief demonstration of the Showcase Dome, a research environment equipped with a 15-foot tilted multi-projector dome display for interacting with data in an immersive 180-degree field of view.

RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill is located in the ITS Manning Building on UNC Chapel Hill campus, 121 Manning Drive. Parking is available in the UNC Hospitals lot on Manning Drive. For directions, see http://www.renci.org/focusareas/eduoutreach/bistro.php.

RSVP by June 23 to
jshelton at renci.orgjshelton at renci.org

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization. For more, see www.renci.org.

On May 6, the room, which uses 12 projectors to create a 360-degree display for virtual, immersive and interactive experiences, hosted the student exhibit “Luminescence ,” a conglomeration of digital media art projects created by 11 students in David Tinapple’s Advanced Digital Media Studio. Luminescence was both an art exhibit and a final project for these students, and the Social Computing Room, which accommodates directed audio and high definition video on all four walls, was the perfect setting to experience their work.

“As a teaching environment, RENCI’s Social Computing Room was a powerful motivator and helped the students to see the concept of video and interaction in a new light,” said Tinapple, an art department instructor. “The collaboration across disciplines, artists working with visualization specialists, was a pleasure and rewarding. Together we pulled it off technically and the work looked great. The art exhibit was a success.”

Luminescence was the culmination of a semester’s worth of coursework in digital media production. The class was a hands-on lab, in which students learned how to work with the latest tools of interactive multimedia in the context of contemporary digital media art, such as interactive video installations, multimedia authoring, interactive media programming, and robotic camera platforms. Their multimedia projects were created with Max/MSP/Jitter, graphical programming software used in installation and performance art, computer music, theater, video DJ performance, data visualization, robotics, and more. The software’s visual programming approach is well suited for artists and musicians, fostering experimentation and the rapid construction of complex and rich interactive audiovisual systems.

Under the direction of Tinapple, the students developed their work and then collaborated with RENCI visualization experts. “We wrote our software taking into account the dimensions of the Social Computing Room and resolutions of this wrap-around display, said Tinapple.  “We also utilized the sound system and camera network. Our software could call up any of the four video cameras mounted in the room and use the video feed to track the movement of viewers, thus making it clear to the viewer that there is a relationship between the body movement and the image on screen. We also as a class built a system for simply playing back video on all four walls of the room. This involved some trial and error to find the highest resolution we could use and still maintain high frame rates, but in the end it worked very well.”

RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill opened in late 2007 in the ITS Manning Building. The state-of-the-art facility gives RENCI the chance to collaborate with UNC faculty, staff and students and to leverage their expertise for existing and new RENCI projects. For UNC faculty, this means the chance to partner with RENCI and utilize its advanced technologies, computing resources and expertise.

“Collaborating with David Tinapple and the art students was a valuable experience for both parties. The students understood quickly the technical issues of their project and saw the benefit of using our systems, which will prepare them for the immersive and large-scale projection systems that they may encounter in the future,” said Eric Knisley, a researcher in 3D visualization at RENCI. “We hope to build more partnerships between RENCI and the UNC community.”

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

Late in 2007 RENCI joined CineGrid, a non-profit organization aimed at bringing together filmmakers, visualization specialists, animators and other digital media experts to share very high-quality digital media over high-speed photonic networks. CineGrid hopes to build a worldwide community that uses high-performance grids and grid infrastructure to share projects, ideas and applications, test new collaboration tools, experiment with distributed online production techniques, and evaluate new ways of delivering digital media content. CineGrid members include artists, filmmakers, researchers, educators and others interested in new ways of sharing and producing media-rich content for education, research, entertainment and artistic expression.

RENCI is working to connect its CineGrid node to the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) at 1 gigabit per second (Gb/s) and from there to high-speed research networks worldwide that host CineGrid nodes. The 1 Gb/s connection eventually will be upgraded to allow data transfer rates of 10 Gb/s.

“CineGrid is an exciting experiment in providing distributed media content, including film clips, scientific visualizations, and streaming performances, through a grid environment that includes high-speed networks, computing resources, data storage capabilities and collaboration tools,” said Ray Idaszak, director of RENCI’s visualization and collaborative environments group and a member of the CineGrid executive committee. “Much of the work on CineGrid will involve looking at new ways to present and to share digital media and scientific images, but many filmmakers and film studios are also interested in using a grid environment for editing, color work, and obtaining content from diverse locations.”

RENCI plans to be the first CineGrid node to offer three-dimensional, stereoscopic content at extremely high resolution–four times the resolution of high definition TV or 4,096 x 2,160 pixels. The institute plans to purchase two 4K video cameras to create content for the grid. Content could include scenes of North Carolina’s coast or mountains, live performances at North Carolina universities or other venues, digital art from local artists, faculty and students, and scientific visualizations from researchers.

To launch its involvement in CineGrid, RENCI plans to collaborate with Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to film an upcoming  performance at the university’s Memorial Hall. The concert, still to be chosen, will be one in the series of performances presented each year by Carolina Performing Arts.  RENCI also plans to share its CineGrid content with North Carolina’s state and regional film commissions, said Idaszak.

“In the long run, we hope that sharing this technology and CineGrid content with the North Carolina film community will become a way to attract more film production to the state,” he said.

For more on CineGrid, see http://www.cinegrid.org

Students and teachers from Belvoir Elementary School in Greenville became some of the first people to learn about weather and geography using RENCI at East Carolina University’s new state-of- the-art high resolution visualization wall. More than 40 students and their teachers attended a program on Oct. 30 that was put together by Theodore “Teddy” Allen, a geography graduate student and RENCI at ECU research assistant, and Sue Chapman, administrative support specialist for the University Honors, ECU Scholars, and Undergraduate Research Programs.

The students participated in a variety of activities, including the visualization wall demonstration. They viewed satellite animations of hurricanes and Google Earth fly-bys, interacted with NASA’s World Wind, a geospatial visualization platform, and used 3D glasses to see stereoscopic animations. The program also featured a hands-on introduction to meteorological instrumentation, during which the students used hand-held instruments to measure temperature and wind speed at various locations.

“The two sessions, all within a one hour time span, provided a dynamic setting with various interactive programs for the students to enjoy,” said Allen. “We in the geography department and at RENCI at ECU felt that this was a great opportunity to introduce the Belvoir students to our geography department. They all assured me that they would strive to become future geographers at ECU.”

Michael Bassman, assistant vice chancellor and director of the University Honors Program, EC Scholars and Undergraduate Research, noted that many of the students are part of the Latino migrant community and that this was their first chance to see the the ECU campus. Allen said the event marked the beginning of a relationship between RENCI and Belvoir Elementary.

“I know that Belvoir and ECU Scholars are always looking for new opportunities to introduce exciting topics to the students,” he said.

CHAPEL HILL, October 31, 2007—Integrated models for disaster planning and management, virtual environments for research and decision support, and computing and visualization to reveal the functions of proteins and gene mutations linked to cancer are among the presentations that will be featured in the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) booth at SC07 in Reno.

The SC07 exhibition will be held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center as part of the SC07 conference, beginning Monday night, Nov. 12, through Thursday, Nov. 15. The RENCI booth is #3215.

In its second appearance at an SC conference, RENCI will highlight its work over the last year with federal and North Carolina-based agencies to use advanced technologies to improve disaster planning and response. A presentation on the Institute’s FEMA-funded effort to create new high-resolution floodplain maps for coastal North Carolina will kick off the RENCI exhibit at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12. The presentation will cover the background and approach to this work, which is still in progress and is expected to use more than 500,000 compute hours on RENCI’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer, Ocracoke. It will include visualizations on a high-resolution tiled display wall showing a hypothetical tropical storm slamming into North Carolina’s Cape Fear River.

RENCI also will demonstrate its collaborative workspace for emergency managers, called NC-FIRST (10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13), and its use of the Regional Hydro-Ecologic Simulation System (RHESSys) to examine drought conditions in the southeastern U.S. (11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14).

In addition, the RENCI will booth will highlight two projects designed to help researchers understand the complex interactions of proteins and genes and their relationship to human diseases. A demonstration with researchers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will present MotifNetwork, a user-friendly environment for facilitating analysis of protein domains, or motifs. These subsequences of amino acids contained within proteins define their activity and mode of regulation and offer another focus of analysis for studies of gene function, gene interaction and gene and organism evolution. Another presentation will highlight 3D visualizations created to help scientists study protein-protein interaction networks triggered by exposure to ultraviolet radiation. The goal of the work, which is funded by NCSA, is to better understand the changes in DNA caused by exposure to sunlight that trigger the development of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer.

“The presentations in the RENCI booth illustrate that this conference has evolved well beyond showcasing the latest powerful hardware,” said RENCI Director Dan Reed. “High performance computing, networking, visualization and collaboration technologies are now essential tools used by scientists and by government decision makers. Our field is affecting broad areas of the human experience, including how we diagnose and treat diseases and how we respond to natural disasters. The RENCI booth will highlight some of these broad impacts.”

Other features of the RENCI booth will include:

• An overview of RENCI research into novel uses of the 3D Internet.  In a demonstration conducted live from the RENCI Second Life Island, RENCI researchers will provide a tour of the island and the prototype virtual disaster command center it has developed there. The command center features real-time 3D maps, the ability to interact with avatars from a wide range of government agencies, and views of real-time data from sensors, satellites, the National Weather Service, and other sources. The demonstration, called Exploring the Emerging 3D Internet: Virtual Environments for Social Computing and Situational Awareness, takes place at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13. Those who miss the demonstration will have the chance to explore RENCI’s Second Life island and view a virtual poster session using guest logins and avatars that will be available in one of the booth kiosks.

• A variety of quality of service issues related to large-scale grid computing will be examined in several presentations. At 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, RENCI will demonstrate Teresa, a runtime qualitative performance analysis framework, and its use in providing performance validation and diagnosis for a workflow of the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) program. At 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, RENCI will demonstrate its fault tolerance and recovery system and its research to integrate the system with the Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) stack.

• Booth visitors will have the chance to use a Gigapixel Image Viewer to manipulate super high-resolution images with a total pixel density of 1.2 gigapixels. Many of the images are 360-degree panoramas consisting of about 150 images digitally stitched together. With a wireless mouse, users will be able to pan, and zoom in and out on the images without any loss of resolution. RENCI is exploring use of this technology in fields as varied as medical diagnostics and disaster planning. The Gigapixel Viewer will be introduced at 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12. SC07 participants will be able to explore the gigapixel imagery on their own in one of the booth kiosks throughout the exhibition.

CHAPEL HILL, NC, October 24, 2007–The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) today announced a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to create a new RENCI engagement center focused on forecasting urban growth and its impacts.

RENCI at UNC Charlotte will be administered by UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute and will be developed as a partnership among the Urban Institute, the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science and the Charlotte Visualization Center. The three campus entities will collaborate on interdisciplinary research that addresses trends in land use and development in the Charlotte area, and the effects of urbanization on natural resources, traffic patterns, urban infrastructure, quality of life and disaster response.

Using resources provided through RENCI’s statewide organization, RENCI at UNC Charlotte will develop models to forecast future urban development, create and disseminate interactive, visual simulations of data on urbanization trends, and deploy visual decision support tools that stakeholders will be able to use to develop and assess sustainable growth and economic development policies.

The new center at UNC Charlotte will contribute its research and expertise to RENCI’s statewide mission of solving problems important to North Carolina through collaborations among research institutions, government and business. It will link via the North Carolina Research and Education Network to RENCI headquarters in Chapel Hill, to centers on the Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State campuses, and to engagement centers at UNC Asheville and East Carolina University in Greenville. 

 “RENCI at UNC Charlotte will expand our reach into our state’s largest metropolitan area and will bring a new core of university expertise to bear on an issue of great importance to North Carolina, our region and our nation,” said RENCI Director Dan Reed. “The work done at this new RENCI center will be valuable to urban and regional planners, developers, government officials, and citizens and will serve as a model for other communities wrestling with issues related to urbanization. We welcome our Charlotte colleagues to the RENCI virtual organization and look forward to many collaborations.”

RENCI was launched in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of UNC Chapel Hill, Duke and NC State universities with a mission of initiating multidisciplinary research to address problems important to North Carolina. The institute received state funding in 2005 and launched multidisciplinary research efforts focused on planning and mitigating natural disasters, finding the genetic causes of disease, and using technology to improve healthcare.  The institute is designed to be flexible, able to address a range of complex problems, to engage experts in the university system, in business and in government, and to share resources and expertise among its seven locations.  

“Being a RENCI center means we are part of a statewide infrastructure that includes other visualization systems, software, data, storage systems, and many scientists and technology experts at sister universities,” said Jeff Michael, director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and head of RENCI at UNC Charlotte. “This collaboration will give our work statewide and national visibility because of RENCI’s connections across North Carolina and in the national research community. We are excited about the possibilities.”

In addition to Michael, leadership for RENCI at UNC Charlotte will come from a research team that includes: Bill Ribarsky, director of the Charlotte Visualization Center; Jean-Claude Thill, Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy; and Ross Meentemeyer, director of the Center for Applied GIS.

Using urbanization growth models created at the Center for Applied GIS and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, RENCI at UNC Charlotte will leverage the Charlotte Visualization Center’s advanced visualization resources to develop a “Renaissance Situation Room,” featuring interactive, high-resolution and stereoscopic display systems, multi-user touch-sensitive surfaces, and tracking devices. The room will be used for visual analysis of models, simulations and real-time data. Through the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, RENCI at UNC Charlotte also will implement a strong education and outreach program aimed at sharing the center’s research and urban planning decision support tools with government, community groups and the business community.

Registration is now open for the 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop, hosted by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). This free workshop will be held Oct. 21-23 at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center for Continuing Education. To register, go to http://www.mses07.net.

The conference also seeks presentation ideas on topics related to all areas of e-science. Some examples include:

• Modeling of natural systems
• Knowledge discovery and merging datasets
• Science data analysis, mining, and visualization
• Healthcare and biomedical informatics
• High performance computing in science
• Innovations in publishing scientific literature, results, and data
• The impact of eScience on teaching and learning
• Applying novel information technologies to disaster management
• Robotics in science
• Scientific challenges with no obvious computing solutions

The program committee will evaluate abstracts and those not selected for presentation will be offered the chance to participate in a poster session. Abstracts are being accepted online at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/escience07/. The deadline for abstract submissions has been extended to Aug. 20. 

The workshop will address the challenges created by the ubiquitous use of computers in scientific research. As the possibilities of scientific computing have expanded, new issues have begun to impact researchers across disciplines. Insights made possible in a discipline through computational resources catalyze change and accelerate discovery in other areas. More and more, researchers must communicate and share information with colleagues in other disciplines.

The Microsoft eScience Workshop will bring together scientist from a variety of disciplines to share their research and their experiences of how computing is shaping their work. The focus will be on the research, and the technologies that make that research possible.
 
Workshop co-chairs are RENCI Director Dan Reed and Tony Hey, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for technical computing. Event posters are available upon request from smercer@microsoft.com.

White’s research team is developing strategies for minimizing the amount of nitrogen that farmers use by pinpointing what areas need to be fertilized (and by how much) and what areas don’t. It is part of a growing agricultural research field called precision agriculture, which seeks to use agricultural pesticides and fertilizers more efficiently by applying them at appropriate rates when and where necessary to optimize productivity and profit. Precision agriculture practices are good for the environment and also for the farmer’s pocketbook, since expensive applications of fertilizers and pesticides are used more efficiently.

White’s research, funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agricultural Systems grant no. 00-52103-9644, uses remote sensing in the form of aerial color-infrared photography to determine the nitrogen needs of wheat and corn and develop fertilizer application maps in geographic information systems (GIS) mapping software.  To assess the environmental consequences of the site-specific nitrogen management in comparison to traditional uniform nitrogen management, the researchers monitored groundwater nitrate levels in numerous wells installed in an experimental field. The process provided data that helped determine groundwater quality, how the different crops responded to site-specific management, and how and where nitrates concentrate over time.

White’s data was in the form of tables, graphs, maps, and spreadsheets until he connected with visualization specialists at RENCI at NC State, the RENCI engagement center on NC State’s Centennial campus. Several months ago, he began working with Jeff Heard, a RENCI senior data software developer at RENCI at NC State, to turn his research data into visual models. Steve Chall, a senior visualization software developer at the NC State center, has also joined the project.
“RENCI created a visualization, which we can view on a large tiled display wall, that shows very clearly the nitrate levels in the groundwater over time,” said White. “We can graphically view how groundwater nitrate concentrations change in conjunction with the rise and fall of the water table and see what is happening underground, which is something we couldn’t do just by looking at our data.”

The visualization wall at the RENCI engagement center allows White to observe changes in the nitrate levels in groundwater over time. He can stop the motion and move forward and backwards in time and he can easily observe the relationship between precipitation and the groundwater nitrate levels. The visual data is helpful not only to White and his research team; it could also be used to help farmers understand how nitrates behave in the soil and in groundwater and pinpoint problem areas in their fields.

“Nitrates can get into water supplies and surface waters, and the more we can control that, the better,” said White.
White and his research team gathered data for five years from a 30-acre test field at the Lower Coastal Plain Tobacco Research Station in Kinston, NC. Some plots received uniform applications of nitrogen—a common practice, which doesn’t take into account how much fertilizer might actually be needed. Other plots received site-specific applications, using the remote sensing data that monitored the nitrogen requirements of the crops.  Groundwater samples were taken as available from 0- to 12-feet deep from 60 wells in the field to measure the nitrate level in the groundwater. Water table depths were also determined.

Once RENCI at NCSU received White’s data, Heard worked to port it into a visual format in order to see the changes in the groundwater nitrate and water table levels over time beneath the field.

“This is an example of how the resources of RENCI—in this case our ability to visualize complicated datasets—can benefit a research team and help them solve important problems,” said Theresa Marie Rhyne, director of RENCI at NC State. “When researchers visualize their data, they are able to look at it in a much more dynamic and realistic way. Often, this new view of the data gives them new insights into its meaning.”

The next stage of the study for White and his team will be to continue collaborating with RENCI experts to run the visualization at different speeds and view it from different angles so the data can be better interpreted. For more information, see Jeff White’s homepage.