Exploring and visualizing sea ice chart data using Java-based GIS tools

The sea ice data set complied by the National Ice Center (NIC) contains abundant information about sea ice geographical coverage and changes during the last 30 years. These data have significant scientific value to understand the changing Earth systems. However, given the relatively high temporal frequency and the intrinsic spatial nature of the data, the data set is relatively difficult to use by researchers without sophisticated information technology (IT) skill. In this paper, we report an effort to develop tools to facilitate the exploration, statistical visualization, and analysis of the sea ice data. These user-friendly tools will enable geoscientists with little IT skill to examine different aspects of the data on-line to determine if they should pursue further to acquire the data for more rigorous analyses. Various functions and utilities of these prototype tools are reviewed in this paper.