Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

OccVis: a visual analytics system for occultation data

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Visualization Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The FY-3C satellite returns more than 250,000 occultation data each year, each of which records high vertical resolution profiles of various climatic parameters in the range of 0–1000 km above the Earth. These long-term, stable, and globally distributed observations can be used to improve climate modeling and analyze trends in spatial climate. However, traditional methods based on small samples meet challenges in analyzing the multi-dimensional occultation data in large volume. In this paper, we developed OccVis-a visual analytics system for multi-dimensional and multi-scale comparative analysis of occultation data. With a novel workflow, a series of data processing methods are proposed to support data correcting, patching, and clustering. Moreover, a matrix view with two modes is presented for overview, and a detail view along with time series view is provided for further analysis. Domain scientists can easily utilize our system to visually and interactively explore multivariable occultation data at different time and space scales. Finally, we conduct case studies in climate modeling of ionosphere and obtain several preliminary results to demonstrate the usage and effectiveness of our system.

Graphical abstract

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Andrienko G, Andrienko N (2008) Spatio-temporal aggregation for visual analysis of movements. In: IEEE symposium on visual analytics science and technology. VAST’08. IEEE, pp 51–58

  • Andrienko N, Andrienko G (2010) Spatial generalization and aggregation of massive movement data. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 17(2):205–219

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Andrienko G, Andrienko N, Rinzivillo S, et al. Interactive visual clustering of large collections of trajectories. IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, 2009. VAST 2009. IEEE, 2009:3-10

  • Bai WH, Sun YQ, Du QF, Yang GL, Yang ZD, Zhang P, Bi YM, Wang XY, Cheng C, Han Y (2014) An introduction to the FY3 GNOS instrument and mountain-top tests. Atmos Meas Technol 7:1817–1823

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bai W, Wang G, Sun Y et al (2016) Application of Fengyun 3-C GNSS occulation sounder for assessing global ionospheric response to magnetic storm event. Atmos Meas Tech Discuss 1:1–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Biondi R, Steiner AK, Kirchengast G, et al (2015) Characterization of thermal structure and conditions for overshooting of tropical and extratropical cyclones with GPS radio occultation. In: ICHMT SPRAY-05 heat and mass transfer in spray systems, pp 29395–29428

  • Brunner L, Steiner AK, Scherllinpirscher B et al (2015) Exploring atmospheric blocking with GPS radio occultation observations. Atmos Chem Phys 16(7):4593–4604

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ester M (1996) A Density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. In: ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp 226–231

  • Fishbach FF (1965) A satellite method for temperature and pressure below 24 km. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 9:528–532

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frank A (1998) Different types of times in GIS. In: Egenhofer MJ, Golledge RG (eds) Spatial and temporal reasoning in GIS. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 40–62

    Google Scholar 

  • Graves A (1997) Long short-term memory. Neural Comput 9(8):1735–1780

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hao MC, Dayal U, Keim DA, et al (2005) Importance-driven visualization layouts for large time series data. In: IEEE symposium on information visualization. IEEE, pp 203–210

  • Hao M, Dayal U, Keim D, et al (2007) Multi-resolution techniques for visual exploration of large time-series data. In: IEEE VGTC conference on visualization joint eurographics. Eurographics Association, pp 27–34

  • Hochreiter S, Schmidhuber J (1997) Long short-term memory. Neural Comput 9(8):1735–1780

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hong F, Chen S, Guo H, et al (2017) Visual exploration of ionosphere disturbances for earthquake research. In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 symposium on visualization, pp 1–8

  • Jing Z, Liu J, Li C (2017) Research and discussion on the international reference ionosphere model. J Guilin Univ Technol 37(1):114–119

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Ken S (1985) Animating rotation with quaternion curves. ACM Siggraph Comput Graph 19(3):245–254

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liang K, Junbo H, Dong J, et al (2018) Design and verification of open loop tracking technology for GPS atmospheric occultation. In: China satellite navigation academic annual conference

  • Liao M, Zhang P, Yang GL et al (2016) Preliminary validation of the refractivity from the new radio occultation sounder GNOS/FY-3C. Atmos Meas Tech 9(2):781–792

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lusignan B, Modrell G, Morrison A, Pomalaza J, Ungar SG (1969) Sensing the Earth’s atmosphere with occultation satellites. Proc IEEE 4:458–467

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma Z, Guo Y, W Bin (2011) The GPS radio occultation data and its current operational applications to the numerical weather prediction. Acta Meteorol Sin 69(1):208–218

    Google Scholar 

  • Nykiel G, Zanimonskiy YM, Yampolski YM et al (2017) Efficient usage of dense GNSS networks in central Europe for the visualization and investigation of ionospheric TEC variations. Sensors 17(10):1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Olkin CB et al (2014) Pluto’s atmospheric structure from the July 2007 stellar occultation. Icarus 239:15–22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Qi Z (2011) The design of automatic sun tracking system based on ARM. Hunan University, Changsha Shi

    Google Scholar 

  • Robert K, Dennis T, Michael W et al (2013) Trajectory lenses—a set-based filtering and exploration technique for long-term trajectory data. Comput Graph Forum 32(3pt4):451–460

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Romano V, Pau S, Pezzopane M et al (2013) ESWua: a tool to manage and access GNSS ionospheric data from mid-to-high latitudes. Ann Geophys 56(2):1861–1867

    Google Scholar 

  • Scherllinpirscher B, Steiner AK, Kirchengast G (2014) Deriving dynamics from GPS radio occultation: three-dimensional wind fields for monitoring the climate. Geophys Res Lett 41(20):7367

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schreiner W, Sokolovskiy S, Hunt D, Rocken C, Kuo Y-H (2011) Analysis of GPS radio occultation data from the FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC and Metop/GRAS missions at CDAAC. Atmos Meas Tech 4:2255–2272

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shanbhag P, Rheingans P, Desjardins M (2005) Temporal visualization of planning polygons for efficient partitioning of geo-spatial data. In: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE symposium on information visualization. IEEE Computer Society, p 28

  • Tominski C, Andrienko N, Andrienko N et al (2012) Stacking-based visualization of trajectory attribute dat. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 18(12):2565–2574

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang Z, Ye T, Lu M et al (2014) Visual Exploration of sparse traffic trajectory data. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 20(12):1813–1822

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang S, Zhu G et al (2015) For the first time fengyun3 C satellite-global navigation satellite system occultation sounder achieved spaceborne BeiDou system radio occultation. Acta Phys Sin 64(8):089301.1–089301.8

    Google Scholar 

  • Wood J, Dykes J, Slingsby A et al (2007) Interactive visual exploration of a large spatio-temporal dataset: reflections on a geovisualization mashup. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 13(6):1176–1183

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wu X (2008) Radio occultation technique for ionosphere detection. Chinese Academy of Sciences Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing

    Google Scholar 

  • Yang GL, Sun YQ, Bai WH et al (2018) Validation results of NmF2 and hmF2 derived from ionospheric density profiles of GNOS on FY-3C satellite. Sci China Technol Sci 1:1–12

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang Y, Luo W, Mack EA et al (2016) Visualizing the impact of geographical variations on multivariate clustering. Comput Graph Forum 35(3):101–110

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhao Y, Luo F, Chen M et al (2019) Evaluating multi-dimensional visualizations for understanding fuzzy clusters. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 25(1):1–10

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ziegler H, Jenny M, Gruse T, Keim DA (2010) Visual market sector analysis for financial time series data. In: Proceedings of the IEEE symposium on visual analytics science and technology, Salt Lake City, UT, pp 83–90

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant No. XDA19080102, the National Key Program for Science and Technology Research and Development (2017YFB0203300), and Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS, Grant No. QYZDB-SSW-SMC004-02.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shiyu Cheng, Guihua Shan, Jun Liu, Yang Gao & Ping Wei

  2. National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Weihua Bai & Danyang Zhao

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shiyu Cheng & Jun Liu

Authors
  1. Shiyu Cheng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Guihua Shan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Jun Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Yang Gao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Ping Wei
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Weihua Bai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Danyang Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guihua Shan.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Cheng, S., Shan, G., Liu, J. et al. OccVis: a visual analytics system for occultation data. J Vis 22, 609–624 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-018-00545-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-018-00545-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation