Web-Based Visualization of Marine Environmental Data: Performance Analysis of a MatPlotLib Implementation
Joseph A. James, Teng-Sheng Moh, Christopher A. Edwards · 2016
Vast amounts of environmental data, and specifically, ocean data are collected every day. These data are multi-dimensional, with longitude, latitude and depth coordinates and time at which it is collected. Numerous ocean variables are tracked including at least temperature, salinity, currents, sea surface height and chlorophyll concentration. The many uses of these data include weather forecasting, scientific research, and various uses by industries such as petroleum and fishing. Due to the size of the data sets and the dimensionality of the data, it is challenging to present it in useful formats and to make visual representations available real-time in a web-based app. In this paper we implement a web-based visualization system for environmental data using MatPlotLib that generates heat maps on demand for data sets up to 538,656 points in 6.1 seconds. We also analyze qualitative factors of this system.