The ECMWF METVIEW is an interactive meteorological application, which enables operational and research meteorologists to access, manipulate and visualise meteorological data on UNIX workstations.
A feature of meteorological graphics is the great variety of possible presentations associated with the same data set. Consider, for example, a 4D distribution (space and time) of one meteorological variable (e.g. temperature) as produced by a NWP model. Such distribution will consist of as many fields as there are vertical levels in such a model representing the atmosphere, multiplied by the timesteps produced during the integration.
Different types of graphical presentations are widely used in the meteorological area. Ideally, users would like to combine these types of presentations, a feature which is not easily available in the current generation of meteorological visualisation systems.
The concept of multidimensional data visualisation can be described as the presentation of different and coherent perspectives of the same data set. The idea of different perspectives (or views) of the same data set stems from the discussion outlined above. The notion of coherence states the fact that these views are linked i.e. changing the data set should affect all presentations simultaneously.
The concept of multidimensional visualisation has been applied in practice as the conceptual basis for the new METVIEW PlotMod visualisation module which will be presented