The Digital Earth Viewer: A new visualization approach for geospatial time series data

The study of the earth’s systems depends on a large amount of observations from homogeneous sources, which are usually scattered around time and space and are tightly intercorrelated to each other. The understanding of said systems depends on the ability to access diverse data types and contextualize them in a global setting suitable for their exploration. While the collection of environmental data has seen an enormous increase over the last couple of decades, the development of software solutions necessary to integrate observations across disciplines seems to be lagging behind. To deal with this issue, we developed the Digital Earth Viewer: a new program to access, combine, and display geospatial data from multiple sources over time.

Choosing a new approach, the software displays space in true 3D and treats time and time ranges as true dimensions. This allows users to navigate observations across spatio-temporal scales and combine data sources with each other as well as with meta-properties such as quality flags. In this way, the Digital Earth Viewer supports the generation of insight from data and the identification of observational gaps across compartments.

Developed as a hybrid application, it may be used both in-situ as a local installation to explore and contextualize new data, as well as in a hosted context to present curated data to a wider audience.

In this work, we present this software to the community, show its strengths and weaknesses, give insight into the development process and talk about extending and adapting the software to custom usecases.