Meduse: Interactive and Visual Exploration of Ionospheric Data

Abstract

Spatio-temporal models of ionospheric data are important for atmospheric research and the evaluation of their impact on satellite communications. However, researchers lack tools to visually and interactively analyze these rapidly growing multi-dimensional datasets that cannot be entirely loaded into main memory. Existing tools for large-scale multi-dimensional scientific data visualization and exploration rely on slow, file-based data management support and simplistic client-server interaction that fetches all data to the client side for rendering.In this paper we present our data management and interactive data exploration and visualization system MEDUSE. We demonstrate the initial implementation of the interactive data exploration and visualization component that enables domain scientists to visualize and interactively explore multi-dimensional ionospheric data. Use-case-specific visualizations additionally allow the analysis of such data along satellite trajectories to accommodate domain-specific analyses of the impact on data collected by satellites such as for global navigation satellite systems and earth observation.