Evaluation of Marine Data by Visual Means

Water has an outstanding importance for the life on earth. From this results the necessity for the monitoring and interpretation of marine data. For that, the visual analysis is a suitable and effective tool, whereby special demands arise from the heterogenieity of data (different data types, different data sources), the quality of data (missing values, incorrect values), and the large quantity of data. The visualization of marine data is particularly important within both their geographic context and their temporal course. First, this paper introduces a classification for the visualization of spatial and time related data, which is not only appropriate for marine data. Following special visualization and interaction techniques for marine data are discussed. Thereby we do not raise the claim to create new visualization paradigms. Rather we want to show solution concepts and special methods using well known paradigms for a special and complex application area, but also to address limits of the visualization paradigms in these applications.