Large-scale Environmental-Data Visualization

Themes: Social impact, Water & Maritime


Early prototype

A TRL is a measure to indicate the matureness of a developing technology. When an innovative idea is discovered it is often not directly suitable for application. Usually such novel idea is subjected to further experimentation, testing and prototyping before it can be implemented. The image below shows how to read TRL’s to categorise the innovative ideas.

Click to enlarge

Why?


Climate changes pose a threat to many regions in the world, among them the Netherlands due to its low elevation. Understanding such developments and their consequences is crucial in order to act sensibly on them. For this reason, large-scale data capture and interpretation is necessary.

How?


Captured data is complex and difficult to visualize in its entirety. Especially, heterogeneous sensor networks (comprised of weather stations, social media, mobile phones etc.) provide a wealth of different data types and formats. We aim at using visualization to render this otherwise complex information understandable.

When?


Currently, there are 14 weather stations in the Rotterdam area that measure a number of different environmental factors. In addition, we were already able to use social media to correlate messages with larger weather events like rain storms allowing to extract highly localized information.

Prof. dr. Elmar Eisemann

 

Dr. Bert Buchholz