Visualizing 2D Data in Earth Sciences

Abstract

In this chapter we demonstrate advanced two-dimensional visualization techniques in the form of graphical displays of the types of data typically encountered in earth sciences, using MATLAB. The first example displays graphically a temperature and snow accumulation time series for the last 20,000 years from the GISP2 ice core data presented by R.B. Alley (2000), in a single plot with an x-axis and two y-axes (Sect. 5.2). Section 5.3 introduces the use of bar plots for displaying histograms, in which the temperature data used in the previous example is divided over equally spaced temperature intervals (called bins, or classes) and the counts per bin (the number of data points that fall within each bin) are displayed as a bar plot.