Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis of Climate Data

Few scientific topics catch as much attention as climate research these days. Will temperatures rise significantly in the upcoming decades? Will snow and ice covers disappear? Will draugths and severe storms threaten lifes all around the globe? Many questions like these move people, politics, and also business. To give as good as possible answers, climate researchers employ most modern measurement, simulation, and analysis methodology, resulting in challenging compilations of data of heterogeneous form and origin, usually with multi- ple variates, and almost always time-dependent. Accordingly, visualization is challenged and advanced approaches are needed to enable effective exploration, analysis and presen- tation. In this talk recent research work on how to support hypothesis generation in climate research through interactive visual exploration is presented. A discussion of associated challenges explains why visualization of data from climate research clearly has the potential to initiate interesting future research in visualization.