VAPOR 3.2.0 is now live!

Released on February 3, the new 3.2.0 version of NCAR's VAPOR software is live and ready to go to work. VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers. It provides an interactive 3D visualization environment that can also produce animations and still frame images. 

The new version showcases some amazing new features, one of which allows for a more flexible data model, taking inspiration from the NetCDF Climate Forecast Conventions. Another important improvement makes the VAPOR3 graphical user interface more user friendly. It has been restructured to follow best practices for user interface design such as separating commonly used and advanced features, and striving for consistency throughout the application.

In terms of extensibility, VAPOR3 facilitates the addition of new features or modification by the user community. In particular, the VAPOR3 design is intended to ease the process of developing new renderers, or adding support for new scientific file formats.

VAPOR is open-source and designed to support the needs of the broader Earth and space sciences communities. VAPOR development is guided by an international steering committee of scientists who set development priorities, dictate software requirements, and serve as friendly users for testing and evaluating new features.

VAPOR’s unique features include its use of a progressive access model that permits exploration of some of the largest simulation outputs using only desktop computing resources; a feature set and user interface that focus on the needs of the Earth sciences community; and a strong emphasis on supporting quantitative data analysis. It runs on most UNIX and Windows systems equipped with modern 3D graphics cards. VAPOR is a product of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Computational & Information Systems Lab.