EmisView Home Page

Table of Contents

EmisView Downloads and Documentation
Overview of EmisView
Viewing the Analyses Suggested to Date
How to Submit Suggestions for Analyses
Jump to the EmisView Sourceforge Project Page

Overview of EmisView

EmisView is an open source visualization software tool that will improve the quality assurance of emissions data that is input to air quality models. EmisView will be designed to support emissions modeling activities of states, Regional Planning Organizations (RPOs), and the EPA. EmisView will be able to interface with both the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) modeling system, and the CONsolidated Community Emissions Processing Tool (CONCEPT), which is currently under development by the Midwest RPO. The initial development for EmisView is being performed by the Carolina Environmental Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Alpine Geophysics, LLC. EmisView will be released under a GNU Public License, thereby enabling members of the emissions modeling community to understand its workings and enhance it as needed. The initial beta release is expected to occur in the Spring of 2005. The source code will be made available to interested parties during the initial development.

EmisView will be designed and developed to perform analyses that are identified as priorities according to EPA and community specifications. Some of the capabilities that may be included in the software are:

• Plot the hourly, daily, and monthly distribution of emissions with line and bar charts. These plots could be for specific emissions sources, or aggregated by country, state, county, source category code (SCC), coordinates (in latitude-longitude), facility, or any combination of these.
• Display spatial plots of gridded or county emissions, with background maps of countries, states, and counties. Spatial plots will be able to iterate through multiple hours, days, or months depending on data availability.
• Track a single source through the entire emissions modeling process, including spatial allocation, speciation, temporal allocation, layer assignments, growth, and control assignments made using cross-references by the emissions models.
• Compare at least two emissions modeling runs (e.g. versions 1 and 2, controlled and uncontrolled) with as many of the tool’s functions as practicable. The comparison feature shall enable the flagging of differences between two runs using a user-defined tolerance.

In addition to interfacing with SMOKE and CONCEPT data at intermediate processing steps, EmisView will be able to import model ready output files. It will run on Linux personal computers (PCs), and also on PCs running Windows. The software will be released under a GNU Public License. User documentation will be developed that includes example cases of emissions modeling, a list of QA checks that the software can perform, and explanations of how to use all the features of the software. An easy to use installation package will be developed that will include the software, example cases, and documentation. From the project web site at http://emisview.sourceforge.net, users will be able to obtain information about the software, download the software, and submit bug reports and requests for enhancement. An initial test version of the software will be provided to external testers. Necessary adjustments will be made prior to the release of the final version of the software.

Viewing the Analyses Suggested to Date

At the beginning of this project, several groups submitted lists of analyses to consider. These analyses are incorporated as Requests for Enhancement (RFEs) on SourceForge. You may use the Browse feature of SourceForge to look through these by clicking here. To find out more about a particular request, click on the corresponding text in the Summary column. Links to the initial groups of analyses are also provided below for quick access to these suggestions.

Suggestions from Alpine Geophysiscs
Suggestions from Mark Janssen of LADCO
Suggestions from UNC CEP

EmisView Downloads and Documentation

You may now download EmisView version 0.9! Start by downloading and running the EmisView installer. The installer will download the files for you. However, we have found for some reason that it sometimes runs quite slowly on Linux and Solaris. .

• Windows installer (.exe)
• Unix / Linux installer (executable jar file)
• Installation instructions
• User's Guide
• MySQL Version 4.1.13 for Windows
• R Version 2.1.1 for Windows

How to Submit Suggestions for Analyses

To submit your suggestions for analyses, click here, or go to the EmisView Sourceforge Project Page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/emisview and click on the RFE link. This brings you to the EmisView “Browse Feature Requests” page. Once you are on that page you should see a list of the previously submitted analyses.

Note: You must be logged in as a registered SourceForge user to submit a suggestion.

• If you are not currently a user, click on New User via SSL near the upper left corner of the page and follow the indicated steps to first create a password and then (after receiving an e-mail for SourceForge) create a username/login name. After a web page comes up telling you that your account registration has been completed, click on Login via SSL near the upper left corner of the page and log in to your new account.

• If you already have a login name and password but are not logged in, click on Login via SSL near the upper left corner of the page, then log in.

Once you are logged in, use the instructions in the Viewing the Analyses Suggested to Date section to get back to the EmisView “Browse Feature Requests” page. On that page you should see a table that lists the previously submitted analyses. Before submitting your analysis, please check that table to see whether your analysis has already been submitted by someone else. To find out more about a particular request, click on the corresponding text in the Summary column, which takes you to the appropriate “Feature Requests: Trackers” page. If you want to access details on more than one of the listed analyses, return to the “Browse Feature Requests” page by clicking on Browse. If you find that your analysis is not already in the table, click on Submit New from either of these two pages. This takes you to the “EmisView : Feature Request : Submit Tracker Item” page. On this page, please enter the following information about your request:

• Select a Category for the request from the pull-down list, if desired
• Type a short summary of the request (up to 60 characters) in the Summary field
• Enter a detailed description of the request in the Description text box.
• If possible, please provide an example of the analysis product (e.g., a plot or table); this will help us clearly understand the meaning of your request. To do this, click the Check to upload and attach a file checkbox, then click the Browse button to find the file on your local computer. Click on the Open button in the browse window to upload the file. Then enter a short description of the file’s contents in the File Description field.

When you are done filling in all the information, click the Submit button at the bottom. After a few moments, you should be returned to the “Project : EmisView : Browse Feature Requests” page, which should have a message at the top that says “Item Successfully Created.”. Your newly submitted request should appear in the list. It will include a unique Request ID that can be used to reference the request when communicating with the project staff about issues related to the request.