TY - JOUR
T1 - PolarGlobe
T2 - A web-wide virtual globe system for visualizing multidimensional, time-varying, big climate data
AU - Li, WenWen
AU - Wang, Sizhe
N1 - Funding Information:
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation (PLR-1349259, BCS-1455349, and PLR-1504432).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2017/8/3
Y1 - 2017/8/3
N2 - The increasing research interest in global climate change and the rise of the public awareness have generated a significant demand for new tools to support effective visualization of big climate data in a cyber environment such that anyone from any location with an Internet connection and a web browser can easily view and comprehend the data. In response to the demand, this paper introduces a new web-based platform for visualizing multidimensional, time-varying climate data on a virtual globe. The web-based platform is built upon a virtual globe system Cesium, which is open-source, highly extendable and capable of being easily integrated into a web environment. The emerging WebGL technique is adapted to support interactive rendering of 3D graphics with hardware graphics acceleration. To address the challenges of transmitting and visualizing voluminous, complex climate data over the Internet to support real-time visualization, we develop a stream encoding and transmission strategy based on video-compression techniques. This strategy allows dynamic provision of scientific data in different precisions to balance the needs for scientific analysis and visualization cost. Approaches to represent, encode and decode processed data are also introduced in detail to show the operational workflow. Finally, we conduct several experiments to demonstrate the performance of the proposed strategy under different network conditions. A prototype, PolarGlobe, has been developed to visualize climate data in the Arctic regions from multiple angles.
AB - The increasing research interest in global climate change and the rise of the public awareness have generated a significant demand for new tools to support effective visualization of big climate data in a cyber environment such that anyone from any location with an Internet connection and a web browser can easily view and comprehend the data. In response to the demand, this paper introduces a new web-based platform for visualizing multidimensional, time-varying climate data on a virtual globe. The web-based platform is built upon a virtual globe system Cesium, which is open-source, highly extendable and capable of being easily integrated into a web environment. The emerging WebGL technique is adapted to support interactive rendering of 3D graphics with hardware graphics acceleration. To address the challenges of transmitting and visualizing voluminous, complex climate data over the Internet to support real-time visualization, we develop a stream encoding and transmission strategy based on video-compression techniques. This strategy allows dynamic provision of scientific data in different precisions to balance the needs for scientific analysis and visualization cost. Approaches to represent, encode and decode processed data are also introduced in detail to show the operational workflow. Finally, we conduct several experiments to demonstrate the performance of the proposed strategy under different network conditions. A prototype, PolarGlobe, has been developed to visualize climate data in the Arctic regions from multiple angles.
KW - Cyberinfrastructure
KW - big data
KW - geovisualization
KW - multidimensional visualization
KW - scientific visualization
KW - video stream compression
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U2 - 10.1080/13658816.2017.1306863
DO - 10.1080/13658816.2017.1306863
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85016134817
SN - 1365-8816
VL - 31
SP - 1562
EP - 1582
JO - International Journal of Geographical Information Science
JF - International Journal of Geographical Information Science
IS - 8
ER -