Efforts to create generic visualizations, both content and interface, often fail when applied to operational forecasting activities composed of several goals. Although these goals may appear to be related, they are typically composed of distinct tasks. Recent attempts to build generalized systems to address these tasks have been useful for research activities as well as for applications development. However, they fare poorly in more mission-critical environments. Generic solutions, even when oriented toward weather-related problems, may lack sufficient focus to be effective for such purposes. The design of different visualization tools matched to a set of tasks but built on top of a common framework with a similar approach to content is a promising alternative. Thus, a set of visualization tasks coupled with appropriate designs can be developed a priori, and then refined through iteration. Further, generalized approaches to these design elements can be employed to more efficiently develop specialized interfaces and tools matched to user goals.
Successful visualization tools can be characterized as being easy to master via simple interfaces, even if the underlying capabilities may be quite complex. Although highly generalized systems can be employed to provide similar functionality, the lack of focus in the interface increases learning time beyond what would be considerable acceptable in time-critical activities. This is in contrast to what is preferred in many research environments. An effective compromise has been developed, where the generic tools are used for both prototyping new applications and efficient implementation of complete systems, particularly by promoting high-level reuse of underlying tools and design elements. This compromise is addressed by separately decomposing visualization and user tasks. Hence, a given user may require one or more visualization tasks, and a specific visualization technique may support more than one user task. Then the goals of the user in visualizing (i.e., exploration, insight, presentation) are addressed with a recognition that there is a likely desire for specific results, such as: feature or event identification, data set comparison, decision support and communication of results. Independent of the user goals and potential results, is the definition of visualization tasks, composed of various interface actions and graphical composition. From this construction, four distinct classes of weather visualizations are developed, from which interactive tools can be implemented