Web-based visualization of marine environment data

As the long-term marine survey and research, especially with the development of new marine environment monitoring technologies, prodigious amounts of complex marine environment data keep continued and rapid growth. This paper recommends an integrative visualization solution to those data, to enhance the visual display of data and data archives, and to develop a joint use of those distributed data from different organizations or communities. Following this strategy, after the analysis of web services technologies and the concept definition of marine information gird, this paper focuses on the spatiotemporal visualization method and proposes a process-oriented spatiotemporal visualization method. It also provides an original visualization architecture which is integrative and based on the explored technologies. Then it shows how the marine environment data are organized based on the spatiotemporal visualization method, and how the organized data are represented for use with web services and stored in a reusable fashion. Finally, the prototype system for the marine environment data of the South China Sea provides visualization of Argo floats, sea surface temperature fields, sea current fields, salinity, in-situ investigation data and ocean stations. The integration visualization architecture is illustrated on the prototype system which highlights the process-oriented temporal visualization method, which proves the good effect of the architecture and the method promoted by this work.