Development of an Interactive 3D Visualization Framework for Ocean Data

Abstract Understanding ocean data through visualization techniques is a common strategy to comprehend the complex ocean. The traditional visualization techniques are the 2D plots, graphs, and maps. Due to the evolvement of new computing technologies, both hardware and software, it has become possible to bring 3D visualization to the ocean. Open-source technologies such as Python allow for faster rendering times and better visual effects. This study presents an interactive 3D visualization framework using open-source ocean data technologies, ensuring fewer artifacts. In the proposed methodology, the spatial gaps in the in-situ data are filled with the World Ocean Atlas data before interpolating with the kriging method. It is observed that such enhancement of data density reduces artifacts to a large extent and improves 3D visualization. To reduce the poor visualization effect, the land masses in the ocean region are excluded with the aid of convex hull algorithms, and an effective spatial interpolation is applied. This also paves the way for better visualization results. The experiments performed yielded appreciable 3D and 4D visualization plots for different ocean parameters at standard depths.