Bringing transparency into ensemble cluster analysis with the aid of interactive visualization

Ensemble forecasting has become a standard practice in numerical weather prediction in forecasting centres across the world. The large data sets generated by ensemble forecasting systems carry much information, that is difficult to analyse in short time periods, requiring well-designed workflows in order to be useful.

Clustering is one of the ensemble analysis methods that are applied to discover similarities between ensemble members. Cluster analysis involves different steps like dimensionality reduction, core clustering algorithm and evaluation. A large of number of methods have been proposed in the literature for each of these steps, however, only few have been applied to clustering of ensemble forecasts. A major challenge is that for a given ensemble forecast, different choices of methods and data domains can lead to very different clustering results. For example, Kumpf et al. (2018, IEEE Transact. Vis. Comp. Graph.) have demonstrated the sensitivity of clustering results to even small changes in the considered domain. The challenge equally exists for choices in clustering methods and method parameters.

In our work, we are attempting to open up the clustering black box by introducing a visualization workflow that makes transparent to the user how different choices in methods and method parameters lead to different clustering results. To achieve this, a clustering analysis library that works in tandem with the ensemble visualization software “Met.3D” () is being developed. We present the current state of the system and demonstrate its use by analysing an ensemble forecast case study.