Interactive Colormapping

Abstract

Ocean salinity is a critical component to understanding climate change. Salinity concentrations and temperature drive large ocean currents which in turn drive global weather patterns. Melting ice caps lower salinity at the poles while river deltas bring fresh water into the ocean worldwide. These processes slow ocean currents, changing weather patterns and producing extreme climate events which disproportionally affect those living in poverty. Analysis of salinity presents a unique visualization challenge. Important data are found in narrow data ranges, varying with global location. Changing values of salinity are important in understanding ocean currents, but are difficult to map to colors using traditional tools. Commonly used colormaps may not provide sufficient detail for this data. Current editing tools do not easily enable a scientist to explore the subtleties of salinity. We present a workflow, enabled by an interactive colormap tool that allows a scientist to interactively apply sophisticated colormaps to scalar data. The intuitive and immediate interaction of the scientist with the data is a critical contribution of this work.