Visualization Theater

What did the world look like 1 billion years ago? In one of the most complete models of tectonic plate movements assembled, scientists condensed 1 billion years of movement into a 40-second video of interaction over time.

As they move, tectonic plates affect climate, tidal patterns, animal movements, evolution, volcanic activity, the production of metals, and muchmore. Tectonic plates are the life support system that affects everything that lives on the surface of the earth.

This visualization uses Earth science data from sensors on NASA Earth-observing satellites. Measurements visualized include oceanography parameters such as ocean currents, winds, sea surface height and temperature. These measurements aid scientists' understanding of ocean impacts on weather and climate and what this means for future life on Earth.

Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

The Canadian Ocean Literacy Map and Database are designed to connect Canadians to ocean literacy initiatives, programs, events, opportunities, stories, and resources from coast to coast to coast. The platform was built and initially populated using data compiled during the Understanding Ocean Literacy in Canada study (2019-2020). It represents an important resource for Canada’s growing ocean literacy community of practice. Explore the map and add your initiative.

There are over 510 million square kilometers of area on the surface of Earth, but less than 30% of this is covered by land. The rest is water, in the form of ocean! This visualization uses data primarily from the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) to rank the world’s countries by their share of Earth’s surface. Learn more more in this great article by Visual Capitalist.

The Coastal Risk Screening Tool enables users to explore sea level rise and coastal flood risk over time, for anywhere in the world, and under multiple pollution scenarios. The maps allow users to choose between leading sea level rise models and to incorporate the most accurate elevation data available

The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), jointly developed by the European Commission and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a global hydrological forecast and monitoring system independent of administrative and political boundaries.

This tool from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) provides the capability to interactively browse global, full-resolution satellite imagery and then download the underlying data, including data from the Global Precipitation Measurement Missions. Many of the 600+ available products are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now". This supports time-critical application areas such as wildfire management, air quality measurements, and flood monitoring. Arctic and Antarctic views of several products are also available for a "full globe" perspective. Browsing on tablet and smartphone devices is generally supported for mobile access to the imagery.

A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet NASA’s Visible Earth site offers numerous such visualizations of ocean optics, winds, sea- ice movements, tidal energy dissipation, storm tracks, and many other changes over time.

This web site contains a comprehensive review of the surface circulation of Earth’s ocean and classroom investigations appropriate for various disciplines at the high school level.

Visualizing Marine Geology and Geophysics: Explore the ocean's features with animated dives and colorful bathymetric and topographical maps.

This video from NASA is a compelling 26-second animation depicting how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1880. The data come from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures. As NASA notes, “in this animation, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.”

This COSEE NOW community blog offers a compilation of some of the top sites on ocean, climate, and environmental data and science with excellent visual displays of data. This image represents the gradient of sea surface temperature (SST) at each point, and is based off of a 7-day composite of SST collected by the AVHRR instrument on NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites.

(Google animates 315 years of ocean data)
The International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) is the most complete collection of surface marine data in existence, consisting of a digital database of 261 million weather observations made by ships, weather ships, and weather buoys spanning the years 1662 to 2007. These data have now been animated by Google Maps developers Paul Saxman and Brendan Kenny in a stunning visualization.

What did your town look like on a global map 540 million years ago? How about 90 million years ago? Or during the Jurassic period? This fantastic interactive map by Ancient Earth allows you to enter an address and track the location of the geological change occurring since before the Pre-Cambrian period.

Public opinion about global warming is an important influence on policy and political decision making to reduce global warming and to prepare for climate impacts. The Yale Program on Climate Communication team of scientists has developed a geographic and statistical model to downscale national public opinion results to the state, congressional district, and county levels. These visualizations estimate public opinion across the country and offer a rich picture of the diversity of Americans’ beliefs, attitudes, and policy support. Maps are based on data through the year 2016.

Use this web-mapping tool to visualize community-level impacts from coastal flooding or sea level rise (up to 10 feet above average high tides.) Learn about data and methods through documentation; share maps; view photo simulations of how future flooding might impact local landmarks; find data related to water depth, connectivity, flood frequency, socio-economic vulnerability, wetland loss and migration, and mapping confidence.