REVITALISE Visualization Station

Earth Science: Global Sea Level Temperatures

Weather affects humans in a variety of ways, and temperature is just one of many variables used to describe weather. Weather prediction requires knowledge of state variables such as temperature, pressure, wind, dew point, and relative humidity. The National Weather Service (NWS) collects information about the atmosphere from various sources, including Automatic Surface Observation Systems (ASOS) and Automatic Weather Observing Systems (AWOS). Data values for these variables are then interpolated on uniform, equally spaced grids and used in numerical weather prediction models.

The following visualization example was created using mean monthly surface temperature of the earth, interpolated using a mean distance weighted methodology (Shepard, 1968; Willmott et al., 1985) on a 0.5 degrees by 0.5 degrees latitude-longitude grid. A more detailed description of the data can be obtained at http://climate.geog.udel.edu/
~climate/html_pages/README.lw.html

The temperature data can be visualized in several ways. AVS Express is a visualization program that provides high-end visualization modules that can overlay geographical information such as continental boundaries, rivers, etc. on a sphere with temperature represented through colors.