So in the last week or two I switched from working on "Departure Lounge" over to working on "Most Blue Skies". This is an art project that will be exhibited at the Busan Biennale 2006 in South Korea. This is mostly Lise's project but Josh is providing a lot of help, saving me from prolonged frustration on numerous occasions.
Although smaller in scale, the project shares a lot of similarities with Black Shoals (which was just a lot of fun and is one of my fondest memories). Both projects involve the processing of large amounts of data and turning it into some visual form. In this case we're processing atmospheric data in order to show the visitor where in the world they would have to go if they wanted to see the bluest sky at that very moment. We will also show what shade of blue they would see! The colour will be projected in some way onto a big square in the middle of the room and if you go behind the square you will see all the amazing technology that goes into producing that single lovely colour. As you might expect, calculating the colour of the sky in real-time over the whole of the world is turning out to be pretty tricky. We had to find algorithms for simulating radiation from the sun given some atmospheric parameters (took a while) and then try to find data sources for those parameters and try to get data that is as up to date as possible. Of course you have to grapple with mismatched units, satellites (or shuttles!) not flying where you want them to fly, millions of different co-ordinate system, file formats and access methods and also people insisting of writing their code in Fortran and still thinking in terms of punch cards (seriously!).
The other day we went to talk to the Atmospheric Physics department at Imperial about Blue Skies (but mostly we talked about Black Shoals because that actually exists ;-). The place seemed deserted when we arrived and we figured no-one would come but then everyone appeared (I think they thought it would be cooler that in their offices (it was a hot day)). Unfortunately it wasn't, but by that time they were trapped and could not escape from our gripping presentation! Anyway, a few people seemed to get quite into it and we got some good suggestions. Also happened to meet the cousin of someone Markus knows who works in bio-informatics. Small world.
We now have just four weeks to finish (I'm being optimistic and not counting a week of mad overnight in-gallery hacking in Korea). Pretty scary really! So I'd better get back to my GeoTiffs and aerosol optical depths...
