Visualizing spatial and temporal variability in coastal observatories

In this paper, we describe a set of 3D and 4D visualization tools and techniques for CORIE, a complex environmental observation and forecasting system (EOFS) for the Columbia River. The Columbia River, a complex and highly variable estuary, is the target of numerous cross-disciplinary ecosystem research projects and is at the heart of multiple sustainable development issues with long reaching implications for the Pacific Northwest. However, there has been until recently no comprehensive and objective system available for modeling this environment, and as a consequence, researchers and agencies have had inadequate tools for evaluating the effects of natural resource management decisions. CORIE was designed to address this gap and is a major step towards the vision of a scalable, multi-use, real-time EOFS. Although CORIE already had a rich set of visualization tools, most of them produced 2D visualizations and did not allow for interactive visualization. Our work adds advanced interactive 3D tools to CORIE, which can be used for further inspection of the simulated and measured data.