kguay / trmm_rainfall

A Java application that visualizes data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission

TRMM Viewer

written by Kevin C. Guay during the summer of 2011

Overview

This application provides a graphical user interface for interactively plotting data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM).

To Run

• Run rainfall_plotter.jar
• Or run java bin/MainView (see note about flicker bug)

Features

• Pre-loads the data in order to quickly generate maps
• Choose any latitude/ longitude coordinate by clicking on a map (world map or map of the Amazon rainforest)
• Generates a colormap of rainfall for the specified location (years on y axis & months on x axis)
• Quickly and easily change visual appearance of the map using menu bars (e.g. change background color, color scale, etc.)
• Overlay forest fires (from MODIS Aqua & Terra) on top of charts generated for location within the Amazon rainforest
• Overlay rainfall amounts (mm/month) on chart

Known Bugs

• Compiling the application on a Mac running OSX 10.10.3 and Java 6 causes the screen to flicker.
  • Flicker does not occur in the Jar file that was compiled in 2011 using Ubuntu

Application Notes

The majority of this application's code is in the class ImageView. Below is a list of all of the pertinent classes. The application consists of a main window which is set up in MainView as well as an ImageView which displays the map/ graph, the InfoView which displays messages to the user, and the OptionView which offers the user various options in addition to the menubar.

World Map

Plot showing rainfall in Boothbay, Maine

Amazon Map

Plot showing rainfall and fire events in Rio Capim, Brazil

####MAIN CLASSES

MainView

• This class is responsible for setting up the main window and its three sections (left bar, center and bottom bar).
  • The left bar is OptionView, the bottom is InfoView and the center (largest) is ImageView.
• This class also sets up the Menus.

InfoView

• This class is responsible for notifying the user of any important information (i.e. what to do next or latitude longitude).
• It also has a "rightCornerMessage" which is used for the latitude and longitude.

OptionView

• This class is responsible for some user-input options, including x and y cords (lat & long). It is also used to switch between the World and Amazon map views.

ImageView

• Loads all of the TRMM and fire data to displaying the map to generating the graphs
• Responsible for all of the visual information.
• All of the data is loaded when the program starts to improve performance.

RasterFile

• Loads the data into Java for you.

RasterStuff

• Offers a variety of methods including ones to get the Max and Min number in a raster. It is also used to generate the symbology (specifically, the getColor method generates the color (in the precipitation symbology) based on a value of a cell.

TRMMApplet

• This class is used to generate the Applet version of the program (i.e. online version).

All of the data is stored in the directories: data, data_brazil, fire and images files.