Multigraph: Interactive Data Graphs on the Web
M. B. Phillips · AGUFM · 2010
The fields of weather and climate are full of time-series data. Observations, model output, forecasts --almost all aspects of weather and climate involve time dependent data that is often presented in the form of a graph. With this in mind, and considering that the scientific community and the world at large has been turning to the web for several years now as a primary means of communication, there are surprisingly few good tools and techniques available for presenting time-series data on the web. The most common solution is to use a desktop tool such as Microsoft Excel or Matlab to create a graph which is saved as an image and then included in a web page like any other image. Although this is straightforward and simple, it limits the user to one particular view of the data, disconnects the graph from the data in a way that makes updating a graph with new data an often cumbersome manual process, and does not provide the reader with the ability to combine and compare data from separate sources.