Visualization of environmental data

Abstract

This paper describes utilization of environmental data to support decision-making in environmental management and protection. This requires a thorough knowledge of related developments in computer science and a good understanding of the environmental management tasks at hand. As computational power increases, and observation systems sample the environment more densely in space and time, environmental datasets have become increasingly large and more complex. Furthermore, environmental datasets, both observed data and model outputs, are geographically distributed across the network on heterogeneous computing platforms. To understand these large, complex, distributed data sets depends upon the development of new information technologies for integrating the data sets with visualization and analysis technologies. As a support tool for managing, processing analyzing an visualizing environmental data are Geographic Information Systems.