Big Data Visual Analytics for Exploratory Earth System Simulation Analysis

/ Matt Artz

Computers & Geosciences, 61 (2013) pp.71–82

Chad A.Steed, Daniel M. Ricciuto, Galen Shipman, Brian Smith, Peter E.Thornton,
Dali Wang, Xiaoying Shi, and Dean N. Williams

“Highlights:

  • EDEN is freely available and was developed in close collaboration with climate scientists.
  • EDEN employs interactive visualizations and statistical analytics for understanding of earth system simulations and climate change.
  • Bridges the growing gap between viable visualization techniques and real-world climate analysis.
  • Exploratory analysis of real-world CLM data sets using interactive parallel coordinates and other coordinated views augmented by statistical analytics.
  • Visualizations permit visually forming multi-faceted selections using information scent to guide the scientist to the most promising relationships.
“Rapid increases in high performance computing are feeding the development of larger and more complex data sets in climate research, which sets the stage for so-called “big data” analysis challenges. However, conventional climate analysis techniques are inadequate in dealing with the complexities of today’s data. In this paper, we describe and demonstrate a visual analytics system, called the Exploratory Data analysis ENvironment (EDEN), with specific application to the analysis of complex earth system simulation data sets.
An early version of EDEN is used to visually analyze a 1000 simulation CLM4 point ensemble data set with 81 parameters and 7 output variables on ORNL's EVEREST power wall facility which offers 11,520×3072 (35 million) pixels.

An early version of EDEN is used to visually analyze a 1000 simulation CLM4 point ensemble data set with 81 parameters and 7 output variables on ORNL’s EVEREST power wall facility which offers 11,520×3072 (35 million) pixels.

“EDEN represents the type of interactive visual analysis tools that are necessary to transform data into insight, thereby improving critical comprehension of earth system processes. In addition to providing an overview of EDEN, we describe real-world studies using both point ensembles and global Community Land Model Version 4 (CLM4) simulations.”