Commercial desktop graphics Software as tools for scientific analysis and data editing

Peter W. Sloss
National Geophysical Data Center - NESDIS

Not everyone has, or needs, a powerful workstation with CAD and GIS capabilities to manipulate and examine spatially gridded data. Off-the-shelf applications like Photoshop, Bryce, StudioPro, and Illustrator can do very useful things to gridded data -- resize, mask, byte-swap, combine, and display. Scanned or downloaded images can be draped over topographic models and displayed as animated flybys. Need a land/sea mask for your data? The sign bit is your friend. Even 32-bit floating point data can be masked, cut-and-pasted, and otherwise munged in Photoshop. While less rigorous than GIS in defining scale and exaggeration factors, the 3D art software can be powerful tools in data presentation. Several examples supplied to NOAA, National Geographic, and the History Channel will be shown.

BIO - Peter W. Sloss NOAA-NGDC - 1978-present NOAA-GLERL - 1973-78 Ph.D. 1972 - Rice, Marine Geology M.S. 1966 - Chicago, Meteorology B.S. 1964 - Northwestern, Science Engineering. Computer addict from way back.

Auditorium - Paper Tuesday - 1:30 - 1:50 P.M.