Glyphs for visualizing uncertainty in vector fields

摘要

Environmental data have inherent uncertainty which is oftennignored in visualization. Meteorological stations and doppler radars,nincluding their time series averages, have a wealth of uncertaintyninformation that traditional vector visualization methods such asnmeteorological wind barbs and arrow glyphs simply ignore. We havendeveloped a new vector glyph to visualize uncertainty in winds and oceanncurrents. Our approach is to include uncertainty in direction andnmagnitude, as well as the mean direction and length, in vector glyphnplots. Our glyph shows the variation in uncertainty, and provides fairncomparisons of data from instruments, models, and time averages ofnvarying certainty. We also define visualizations that incorporatenuncertainty in an unambiguous manner as verity visualization. We usenboth quantitative and qualitative methods to compare our glyphs tontraditional ones. Subjective comparison tests with experts are provided,nas well as objective tests, where the information density of our newnglyphs and traditional glyphs are compared. The design of the glyph andnnumerous examples using environmental data are given. We show enhancednvisualizations, data together with their uncertainty information, thatnmay improve understanding of environmental vector field data quality