Swedish Road Weather Visualization

Abstract

The large and ever-increasing amounts of time-varying and geospatial digital weather information related to emergency scenarios that must be accessible to the public represent a major research challenge. A need to analyze and make decisions, often in time-critical situations, demand interactive web-enabled visualization tools that can aid the user to explore, communicate and publish visually large geo-information spaces. Geovisual analytics is an emerging research task facilitating dynamic time-linked visual representations that enable the users to simultaneously analyse relations among several different attributes with the aim to augment an analyst and decision-maker capabilities to assimilate complex situations and reach important knowledge. In this context, we introduce a web-enabled application for road weather visualization, a tool for analyzing and communicating information about road weather conditions particularly during the Swedish winter months. RoadVis is customized in close collaboration with domain experts from Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and the Swedish road administration facilitating a collection of dynamic map, weather and information visualization methods integrated with the Adobe© Flash© and Flex© development platform.