Visualizing Climate Model Outputs with CliMAScope

Keywords

visual analytics, design study climate model

Abstract

With the increasing complexity and diversity of climate models, climate scientists often turn to multiple tools to understand and assess relationships between observations and model output. To explore ways to overcome that workflow complexity, we partnered with the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) to develop CliMAScope. CliMAScope is an open source, interactive, web-based land surface climate model visualization tool that aims to unify analysis, comparison, validation, and correlation mapping of observational data with climate land model output. This paper presents a design study of CliMAScope, and explains how the tool's visual and interactive elements support the goal of comparing seamless climate model outputs to observational data.