A Scalable System for Visual Analysis of Ocean Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces pyParaOcean, a scalable, interactive visualization system tailored for ocean data analysis, enabling efficient exploration of complex, high-resolution oceanographic datasets with specialized modules and optimized data handling.

Contribution

The paper presents pyParaOcean, a novel scalable visualization system with integrated oceanographic analysis modules and optimized data management, enhancing interactive exploration of large ocean datasets.

Findings

Demonstrated system utility through a Bay of Bengal case study.

Showed system scalability and efficiency in handling large datasets.

Integrated specialized modules for eddy detection and salinity tracking.

Abstract

Oceanographers rely on visual analysis to interpret model simulations, identify events and phenomena, and track dynamic ocean processes. The ever increasing resolution and complexity of ocean data due to its dynamic nature and multivariate relationships demands a scalable and adaptable visualization tool for interactive exploration. We introduce pyParaOcean, a scalable and interactive visualization system designed specifically for ocean data analysis. pyParaOcean offers specialized modules for common oceanographic analysis tasks, including eddy identification and salinity movement tracking. These modules seamlessly integrate with ParaView as filters, ensuring a user-friendly and easy-to-use system while leveraging the parallelization capabilities of ParaView and a plethora of inbuilt general-purpose visualization functionalities. The creation of an auxiliary dataset stored as a Cinema database helps address I/O and network bandwidth bottlenecks while supporting the generation of quick overview visualizations. We present a case study on the Bay of Bengal (BoB) to demonstrate the utility of the system and scaling studies to evaluate the efficiency of the system.