EddyVis: A visual system to analyze eddies

Research on the eddy evolution can help domain experts understand the role in the transport of heat, salt and biochemical properties in the ocean. Advanced visualization techniques provide opportunities for the analysis and research of ocean eddies. However, the visual analysis of eddy evolution usually only focuses on the tracking path and global statistics. The entity relationship and attribute changes in eddy evolution process cannot be reflected intuitively, due to the limitation of analysis tools. Besides, omissions and errors in detection will interfere with the analysis process. To tackle these problems, we propose EddyVis, a multi-view interactive visual system to expose attributes and morphology of the eddy evolution process, enabling experts to analyze the eddy activities and verify the eddy detection results with the help of three-dimensional streamlines. Domain scientists can easily utilize our system to explore the evolution process, and to compare the detection results under different parameters visually and interactively. We conduct several case studies to demonstrate the usage and effectiveness of our system in the research of events in the eddy lifetime.