Designing a visual environment for exploration of time series of remote sensing data: In search for convective clouds

Interactive animated images are often the only means to explore large time series of meteorological data sets. However, despite being interactive, animations still lead to information overload. We firstly look at the factors limiting the exploratory use of animations for studies of precipitating cloud and argue that two main factors are responsible for that: data complexity and animation design based on images that mimic reality. Then we present an example of how the current approach to visualize time series of meteorological images can be improved by computational methods, particularly by feature tracking. Next, we describe the visualization environment and discuss the representational, data mining and interactive functionality resulting from such a combination in an environment that is specifically dedicated to visual exploration and analysis of precipitating clouds.