Case Study: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration achieves interactive 3D solar wind analysis and faster scientific insights with Rogue Wave Software's PV-WAVE

Solar Data Analysis and Visualization with PV-WAVE®

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) needed better tools to analyze and visualize solar wind outflow data so scientists could study how solar disturbances affect the near‑Earth space environment. NOAA researcher Vic Pizzo was running large simulations on a Cray and transferring subsets to an HP workstation, but traditional batch line plots made interpretation and interactive exploration difficult, so NOAA adopted PV‑WAVE from Rogue Wave Software for ad hoc analysis and visualization.

Rogue Wave Software’s PV‑WAVE delivered interactive 3D visualization, a fourth‑generation language and high‑level analysis libraries that let scientists change parameters in real time, compare arrays, debug simulations, and perform what‑if scenarios. The solution produced publication‑quality graphics, enabled new scientific insights, and accelerated workflows—PV‑WAVE can display 250,000 floating‑point values from disk to screen in under a second—making it an indispensable, productivity‑boosting tool for NOAA’s research.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Vic Pizzo

Visiting Scientist, SEL