Under the title “Data Analysis and Exploration with Visual Approaches” nine authors* delivered on 15 July 2022 a Springer Link study of the Earth system and its related processes, in order to perform a holistic examination and understanding of multidimensional data acquired with a large number of different sensors or produced by various models. To this end, the Digital Earth project developed a set of software solutions to study environmental data sets using visual approaches.

In particular, the Digital Earth Viewer, which is open source and licensed under the EUPL, is a web application for spatiotemporal contextualization and visualization of heterogeneous data sources. It was developed with the goal of enabling real-time exploration of geoscientific data sets across spatial and temporal scales. To this end, it is capable of ingesting data from a large variety of types that are usually found in the geosciences, and it deploys a user interface, which allows for interactive visual analysis. At the same time, online and offline deployment, cross-platform implementation, and a comprehensive graphical user interface are all capabilities that make the Digital Earth Viewer particularly accessible to scientific users.

The Earth Viewer applications are numerous, like “Methane Budget in the North Sea” that is set up to build a methane gas budgeting for the North Sea region. The showcase makes use of the Digital Earth Viewer to unify a large number of data sets under a single visualization interface.

Another example is the 4D Visualization of Marine Data, starting a series of experiments to answer questions regarding profitability and sustainable exploitation of resources in deep sea mining, such as mining for manganese nodules.

A running instance of the application can be accessed at https://digitalearthviewer.geomar.de.

* Study authors are: Everardo González Ávalos, Doris Dransch, Nicola Abraham, Valentin Buck, Daniel Eggert, Tom Kwasnitschka, Daniela Rabe, Flemming Stäbler & Viktoria Wichert 

More info on the study: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-99546-1_3