A simple web-based viewer for gravitational-wave parameter estimation samples

I’ve been thinking recently about how information about gravitational-wave observations are distributed and shared. Currently, the only way to access or visualize the posterior probability distribution for the parameters describing individual observations is by downloading a HDF file from zenodo and manually making plots from this specific format. I plan to write more about a different method to distribute the data as needed as JSON over HTTP, but for now I’ll focus on an application of this data distribution method with a simple browser-based visualization tool.

The viewer is built using Marimo, a Python notebook application that prioritizes reproducibility and (more relevantly for this application) has a strong support for Python in browser using Pyodide a Python distribution that compiles CPython to WebAssembly. Using the UI, users can select which events they want to visualize along with which parameters and waveform models. The requested parameters (and only those parameters!) are then served to the browser where Altair is used to generate standard plots. Currently, the range of plotting options is limited, but I plan to expand these in the future.

Try the interactive example below