Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
information with relative conditions on the ground for that specific location, either
in a table format (Fig.
2
a) or a series of graphs (Fig.
2
b).
3.3 Advantages and Limitations of Both Approaches
The use of a combined temporal animation and clickable hyperlinks displaying
detailed tabular or graphical data within a digital globe environment provides an
interactive display and communication of spatio-temporal data. While the created
time series products provided a broad scale perspective of changes in climatic
conditions, the addition of clickable points provided detailed local information.
This functionality enables end-users to zoom-in on any area of interest and point
and click to explore the data further.
The use of hyperlinks to retrieve locally relevant information is not new. These
functions are available on web mapping tools such as the Bureau of Meteorology
Forecast Explorer (
http://www.bom.gov.au/vic/forecasts/map.shtml
). However, its
use within the Google Earth interface greatly enhances the value of the displayed
climate datasets by bringing together regional data and localised information in a
single, easy to navigate, integrated environment. The availability of high resolu-
tion aerial imagery and elevation also provides contextual information that helps
users relate more easily with the model climate data. We believe the use of these
data visualisation methods represents a significant step forward in communicating
complex scientific models which can better support land management decision
making.
However, the above described visualisation methods inherits the limitation that
the graphs produced by the methodology outlined in
Sect. 3.2
need to be generated
for all centroid locations of a defined landscape. A more efficient technique would
result in an on-demand generation for selected points and locations (area of
interest generated rather than complete statewide coverage). Producing such
graphs for the State of Victoria, at a 5 degree resolution generates a sizeable KML
file (around 300 Mb). This provides a challenge when sharing the results with end-
users either via email or online hosting. A possible solution to this problem would
be the production of the images 'on the fly' by linking the clickable object to a web
server that would produce the graph on demand and give access to the produced
image only once it is requested.
4 Local Scale Data Visualisation
Complex problems such as climate change (for which the implications appear,
to many people, distant and abstract) may be particularly difficult for land man-
agers to relate. A sense that the available data are personally irrelevant may be
exacerbated by the lack of localised climate data (most GCM models typically
