Vismate: Interactive visual analysis of station-based observation data on climate changes

Abstract

We present a new approach to visualizing the climate data of multi-dimensional, time-series, and geo-related characteristics. Our approach integrates three new highly interrelated visualization techniques, and uses the same input data types as in the traditional model-based analysis methods. As the main visualization view, Global Radial Map is used to identify the overall state of climate changes and provide users with a compact and intuitive view for analyzing spatial and temporal patterns at the same time. Other two visualization techniques, providing complementary views, are specialized in analysing time trend and detecting abnormal cases, which are two important analysis tasks in any climate change study. Case studies and expert reviews have been conducted, through which the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach has been confirmed.