REINAS Instrumentation and Visualization

This paper gives a brief system overview of REINAS (Realtime Environmental Information Network Analysis System) and some details on the instrumentation and visualization aspects. REINAS is a continuing engineering research and development system with the goal of designing, developing and testing an operational prototype system for data acquisition, data management , and visualization. As such, it includes a growing web of networked remote and in-situ instruments, a federated geographical database, and an extensible vi-sualization interface. REINAS focuses on the needs of both oceanographers and meteorologists who monitor realtime data or analyze retrospective data that has been collected in the Monterey Bay area. This system is designed to be portable, extensible, and fault tolerant. Among the collaborators on this project are researchers from the UCSC Computer Engineering and Computer Information Sciences Departments and environmental scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute .