Visualizing the Weather: Changes and Uncertainties.

Abstract:

The winter of 2013/14 was markedly cold in the eastern United States, and record-breakingly wet in the United Kingdom. To understand why, we have to see how the atmosphere behaved over this period, and the atmosphere is a complex, non-linear system of many inter-related variables. Modern observing and weather forecasting systems provide a detailed and precise reconstruction of the atmospheric state, but to interpret and communicate the resulting mass of information we need to visualise it. This visualisation is a technical challenge in data handling and programming, and a design challenge in choosing projections, length-scales, colour schemes and variable sets to make video diagnostics that illustrate the important points.

2013/14 is well observed, but to study climate change we need to compare it to much more uncertain reconstructions of similar events in previous years. By using fog as a visual metaphor for uncertainty we can flag uncertain areas in visualisations, illustrate the relationship between weather reconstructions and the raw observations they are based on, and target efforts to improve historical reconstructions.