Audience Dependence of Meteorological Data Visualization

Abstract

The decisions how to visualize a specific data set depend mostly on the kind of data itself. But in order to visualize the data in a perceptually effective way, the audience who will view the results must also be considered. The importance of audience dependence varies between the different fields of applications of visualization techniques. The visualization of meteorological data is a field where audience dependence plays a very important role in determining the way of turning the data into images. We have developed a system for visualizing weather-related data for meteorological researchers as well as for lay TV audience. Both groups have very specific demands on the results. Meteorologists need a presentation containing their symbols and possibly many data sets at the same time to get a better understanding of their data and simulation models. Lay audience need images or sequences they can understand intuitively and easily with their every day experience of weather phenomena. We categorized the types of meteorological data and determined the demands of the two groups. To visualize cloud-specific weather data for the lay audience, e.g., we incorporated fractal functions to show clouds that look like real clouds. The result so far is our system TRITON II, which is used for meteorological research and for the daily production of forecast videos for several German TV stations.