Visual exploration and evaluation of climate-related simulation data

Large, heterogeneous volumes of simulation data are cal-culated and stored in many disciplines, e. g. in climate and climate impact research. To gain insight, current climate analysis applies statistical methods and model sensitivity analyzes in combination with standard visualization tech-niques. However, there are some obstacles for researchers in applying the full functionality of sophisticated visualiza-tion, exploiting the available interaction and visualization functionality in order to go beyond data presentation tasks. In particular, there is a gap between available and actually applied multi-variate visualization techniques. Furthermore, visual data comparison of simulation (and measured) data is still a challenging task. Consequently, this paper introduces a library of visualization techniques, tailored to support ex-ploration and evaluation of climate simulation data. These techniques are integrated into the easy-to-use visualization framework SimEnvVis- designed as a front-end user inter-face to a simulation environment- which provides a high level of user support generating visual representations. 1