Designing a better weather display

Abstract

Weather maps commonly display several variables at once, usually a subset of the following: atmospheric pressure, surface wind speed and direction, surface temperature, cloud cover, and precipitation. Most often, a single variable is mapped separately and occasionally two are shown together. But sometimes there is an attempt to show three or four variables with a result that is difficult to interpret because of visual interference between the graphical elements. As a design exercise, we set the goal of finding out if it is possible to show three variables (two 2D scalar fields and one 2D vector field) simultaneously so that values can be accurately read using keys for all variables, a reasonable level of detail is shown, and important meteorological features stand out clearly. Our solution involves employing three perceptual “channels”: a color channel, a texture channel, and a motion channel in order to perceptually separate the variables and make them independently readable. We describe a set of interactive weather displays, which enable users to view two meteorological scalar fields of various kinds and a field showing wind patterns. To evaluate the method, we implemented three alternative representations each simultaneously showing temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and direction. Both animated and static variants of our new design were compared to a conventional solution and a glyph-based solution. The evaluation tested the abilities of participants both to read values using a key and to see meteorological patterns in the data. Our new scheme was superior, especially in the representation of wind patterns using the motion channel. It also performed well enough in the representation of pressure using the texture channel to suggest it as a viable design alternative.

The State of the Art in Visual Analysis Approaches for Ocean and Atmospheric Datasets

“…Iconic displays is another visualization technique that maps various attributes of multidimensional data to features such as color, shape of an icon, or glyph. Glyphs are commonly used in weather and ocean data displays for showing wind speed and direction [WP13], and for displaying ocean currents [RSAS17]. Pilar and Ware [PW13] evaluated various glyphs and streamlines and showed that integrating glyphs along with streamlines is useful in understanding patterns in flow visualization.…”

Examining Implicit Discretization in Spectral Schemes

“…Despite the visualization community's promotion of more perceptually appropriate alternatives [BGP∗11, BRT95, Mor09, Tru81, LH92, Gre08, KRC02], rainbow color maps remain commonplace in a variety of scientific domains, including medicine [BGP∗11], atmospheric and climate sciences [QM16, DPW∗15], bioengineering [BTGM16], aerospace [KES13], and astronomy [ZDM∗15]. Although domain convention is often used to justify the inclusion of rainbow color map variants in visualization systems [WP13, QM16, PWB∗09], we still do not understand why experts continue to gravitate to spectral schemes. Cited reasons include familiarity [BGP∗11, QM16], aesthetic preference [BGP∗11, Bre97, Mor16], and ease of use [BT07, Mor16], but evidence also suggest that rainbow color maps may be a satisficing design choice for specific types of tasks, such as locating and quantifying extreme values [DPW∗15, WTS∗17, WTB∗18, RNA18, War88, WTB∗18].…”

Visual Multiplexing

“…Using motion to encode variables is common in vector field visualization. Recently, Ware and Plumlee showed that encoding wind direction (Figure 3(l)) using animated traces results in a lower percetual error rate than three static methods [WP13].…”