3-D Interdisciplinary Visualization: Tools for Scientific Analysis and Communication

Abstract

Within the scientific community, interdisciplinary analyses are increasingly emphasized to gain a more complete understanding of how entire Earth systems function. For National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored programs such as EarthScope (http://www.earthscope.org), Ridge 2000 (http://www.ridge2000.org), Margins (http://www.nsf-margins.org), and the Ocean Observatories Initiative (http://www.oceanleadership.org/ocean_observing), this includes trying to identify potentially complex linkages that exist between geological, biological, chemical, and/or physical processes occurring at predefined regions. For this interdisciplinary approach to succeed, numerous, and often disparate, datasets must be combined in a manner comprehensible and accessible to a wide range of scientists. To overcome this hurdle, NSF programs such as those listed above, as well as scientific journals and individual scientists, are turning to interactive, three-dimensional computer visualization as a primary tool for examining and communicating the results of scientific studies ( e.g. , Kent et al. 2000; Dzwinel et al. 2005; Nayak et al. 2005; Singh et al. 2006). This new ability to explore and interact with one-, two-, and three-dimensional geo-referenced datasets greatly enhances audiences' understanding of the research environment as well as how the Earth functions as an interconnected system. While visualization, by definition, is not new to the scientific community ( e.g. , maps, graphs, and drawings) (Koua et al. 2006), the ability to combine two- and three-dimensional data into a 3-D, interactive environment is a relatively recent and rapidly expanding technological and analytical advancement in the geosciences (Schwehr et al. 2005; Kilb and Nayak 2006). The increasing computer storage and processing resources, combined with software programs that are based on a modular methodology (where each dataset is treated as a building block that can be combined with other blocks to create a unified and exploratory environment), are making 3-D visualization more attractive to scientists. For multidisciplinary, multidimensional research, 3-D visualization has certain key advantages over the …