Applications of AVS in the Earth Sciences at Oxford

	Keith Refson, 
	Andy Bingham, 
	Graham Robertson,
	   and 
	Tom Martel

Department of Earth Sciences
Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3PR UK

We present case studies of the practical use of AVS for selected
geophysical applications.  The examples arose from the research
activities of the Earth Sciences Department at Oxford and although no
claim is made for their representativeness of geology or geophysics
they do yield some interesting tips which may be of wider value.

The three chosen examples are:

1) Different ways of handling field data
   defined only on a prescribed domain (in this case the lower mantle)
   are compared. The merits and disadvantages of uniform, scattered and
   curvilinear representations are discussed.  Our experience shows that
   the most important consideration is the behaviour of the chosen
   visualization technique and algorithm at the boundary.

2) One of the most powerful features of AVS
   is the ability to build canned applications for inexperienced users.
   We demonstrate a viewer for 2D gridded data files which has been
   extensively used as a routine tool with a shallow learning curve.  We
   discuss the factors influencing its design, particularly the need to
   write a replacement module for ``field-to-mesh'' which adds the
   required quantitative features.

3) This example demonstrates some ways to
   handle time-dependent field data from an ocean circulation model.