Use of the EventViewer for Visualizing and Exploring Events Extracted from Ocean Observing System Data

Rapidly expanding data collections from ocean observing systems create a need for new tools to process, to explore, and to analyze data. This article presents capabilities of the EventViewer in the context of exploring ocean observing system data. The EventViewer is a graphical user interface for visualizing and exploring patterns in events where events constitute changes of interest in a time series. The EventViewer allows users to make queries on events stored in an events database and explore various spatial, temporal, and thematic patterns in events. Once events are selected, the user can assign event spatial, temporal, and thematic categories to graphic display elements in the interface called bands, stacks, and panels. Selected events are displayed according to their associations with the user-specified categories. The spatial, temporal, and thematic categories can be directly manipulated and rearranged among the bands, stacks, and panels to change the view of events and highlight different patterns. The EventViewer supports exploration of periodic patterns, spatial and temporal trends, and event event relationships. The EventViewer functionality is illustrated with oceanographic events extracted from ocean observing system sensor data collected in the Gulf of Maine. Events were extracted from multiple time series variables collected at a number of locations and depths.