Obstructures

The ATLAS viewer is currently in development, and is being built for the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI). It is a tool for visualizing and inspecting geographically gridded and aggregated data related to agriculture and land use. The user has the ability to inspect any region of the globe, and see how relevant variables pertaining to specific crops change through the time periods encompassed by several datasets. The tool is being developed with a limited set of models and datasets, though many more are planned for the future. Also in development is the ability to map the difference between multiple variables, models, climates, and irrigation systems. In the coming year, we hope to integrate ATLAS with other crop modeling projects.

Behind the scenes, ATLAS uses python to turn data stored in netCDF files into JSON blobs that are drawn using Mike Bostock’s d3 JavaScript library. Geographic data comes from the Global Administrative Areas (GADM) and Natural Earth (NE) projects, and uses Mike Bostock’s TopoJSON as well.