Abstract

Virtual globes are an excellent visualization tool for Earth Sciences data and imagery, giving the user a tremendous amount of control over how the imagery is viewed. Features like zoom, orientation, and tilt provide a great deal of flexibility for looking at the imagery in different ways. Time series animation provides a fourth dimension to the imagery, enabling the visualization of change over time. Near real time animation of time series imagery allows scientists to monitor events as they unfold and assess data quality as it comes in. At NSIDC we have put several of our near real time data streams into kml time series animations, which we update on a daily basis. These visualizations can be powerful tools to help raise public awareness and make the science behind the data more accessible to the public.