Collaborative Research: S12-SSI: Inquiry-Focused Volumetric Data Analysis Across Scientific Domains: Sustaining and Expanding the yt Community

Scientific discovery across the physical sciences is increasingly dependent on the analysis of volumetric - or three-dimensional - data, that may come from a supercomputer simulation, direct measurement, or mathematical models. Researchers typically seek to extract meaningful insights from this data by visualizing and analyzing it in various ways. The ways in which scientists process volumetric data are actually quite similar across domains, but cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer and tool development is blocked by barriers of terminology. This project seeks to enhance an analysis and visualization toolkit named yt that is currently primarily used for astrophysical simulations. yt allows scientists to access and analyze data at several different levels by providing an interface that is designed to answer questions motivated by the underlying scientific problem, while worrying less about details such data formats, specific analysis techniques etc. yt's utilization in computational astrophysics has dramatically increased access to advanced algorithms for both visualization and analysis, and fostered the growth of a community of researchers sharing techniques and results. This project seeks to make yt available and adopted by scientists in other domains of science thus reproducing its success in astrophysics in these other science domains. This project will expand the yt community beyond theoretical astrophysics and enable and promote collaboration and advanced data analysis in the fields of meteorology, seismology and global tomography, observational astronomy, hydrology and oceanography, and plasma physics.