The Visualization Environment is an integrated set of tools that students can use to construct realistic 3-D graphics and animations of what is occurring within a dataset. The download and installation process consists of two steps:
Download and Install Web Start (one time only). WebStart is a program developed by Sun Microsystems that will allow you to start the Visualization Environment from within the VGEE curriculum pages. Note that if you are using Netscape, after installing WebStart, you must close and reopen Netscape before the program will work correctly.
Download and install the Visualization Environment. This requires 19 Mbyte of disk space and can take a little while, especially over modems. You will be asked to give permission for UCAR and Sun Microsystems to install JAVA components onto your computer. All required files (Java jar files) will be downloaded, and VGEE will start. If the installation goes correctly, the Visualization Environment will connect to a remote data source and make a display from that data.
The items below (also accessible from the menu to the left) explain how to perform various functions in the Visualization Environment.
Creating difference maps (highlight the differences between two variables on one image)
Creating contour lines and maps (contour lines connect places with the same variable value)
