Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Designing A Better Weather Display, Colin Ware, Matthew D. Plumlee

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

The variables most commonly displayed on weather maps are atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, and surface temperature. But they are usually shown separately, not together on a single map. As a design exercise, we set the goal of finding out if it is possible to show all three variables (two 2D scalar fields and a 2D vector field) simultaneously such that values can be accurately read using keys for all variables, a reasonable level of detail is shown, and important meteorological features stand out clearly. Our solution involves employing three perceptual "channels", a color channel, a texture channel, and …