A Survey of Visualization Techniques and Tools for Environmental Data

— Visualizing a set of discreet data is often needed in scientific research. In the case of environmental data, it is quite challenging to predict the future variation of a particular variable such as temperature, pressure, and precipitation. Many new visualization techniques and tools are available in the field of software visualization for analyzing large datasets. However, selecting a right tool that will fulfill user requirements for visualizing large datasets is still challenging. This paper reports the findings of a survey we conducted on the techniques and tools currently used for the visualization of environmental data. It overviews several of the more popular visualization tools and briefly assesses their capabilities to support research that involves large datasets of environmental data. A taxonomy of visualization techniques based on the number of variables that can be visualized is also presented. New trends in building related user interfaces and a variety of new visualization techniques with their applicability are also discussed. Finally, several directions of future research in data visualization are outlined.