Visualizing Meteorological Data

Abstract

The extensive growth in meteorological data over the last several decades is imposing severe strains on the meteorologist's ability to fully exploit the data's ultimate value within the time constraints of forecasting operations. Fortunately, the price/performance ratio of the hardware destined to graphically display these datasets is approaching the level of affordability by a significant population of meteorologists. However, this now places a burden on software developers, who are challenged to creatively exploit the hardware for displaying complex meteorological datasets in a mode that exhibits their three-dimensional (3-D), time-evolving nature. In this paper, we address this challenge by fostering an awareness of the valuable interdisciplinary work that might benefit meteorology. Our goals are to promote software progress through reuse of existing techniques rather than by reinvesting ?new? ones, and to stimulate ideas for creating new tools and methods. Our review focuses on 3-D display techniques for time-evolving phenomena, presented in the context of both sides of the human/computer interface. We hope that some of this interdisciplinary knowledge accrued will be applied to meteorology.