OceanPaths: Visualizing Multivariate Oceanography Data

Abstract

Geographical datasets are ubiquitous within the realm of oceanography. While map-based visualizations are useful for many different domains, they can suffer from clutter when used for multivariate data sets. As a result, spatial data exploration in oceanography has often been restricted to multiple maps showing various depths or time intervals. This lack of interactive exploration often hinders efforts to expose correlations between properties of oceanographic features, such as currents. Currents are a key component of ocean dynamics and the existing visualization tools do not serve them well. In an effort to remedy these issues we developed OceanPaths, a browser-based tool that provides powerful interaction and exploration methods for spatial, multivariate oceanography datasets. This tool allows users to define pathways along which the variation of the high-dimensional data can be plotted efficiently. These pathways can be constructed with multiple branches in order to better represent the complex underlying current systems.