An interactive visual analysis tool for investigating teleconnections in climate simulations

Abstract

Teleconnections refer to links between regions that are distant to each other, but nevertheless exhibit some relation. The study of such teleconnections is a well-known task in climate research. Climate simulation shall model known teleconnections. Detecting teleconnections in climate simulations is a crucial aspect in judging the quality of the simulation output. It is common practice to run scripts to execute a sequence of analysis steps on the climate simulations to search for teleconnections. Such a scripting approach is not flexible and targeted towards one specific goal. It is desirable to have one tool that allows for a flexible analysis of all teleconnection patterns with a dataset. We present such a tool, where the extracted information is provided in an intuitive visual form to users, who then can interactively explore the data. We developed an analysis workflow that is modeled around four views showing different facets of the data with coordinated interaction. We present a teleconnection study with simulation ensembles and reanalysis data obtained by data assimilation to observe how well the teleconnectivity patterns match and to demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool.