Information visualization supporting modelling and evaluation tasks for climate models

Information visualization exploits the phenomenal abilities of human perception to identify structures by presenting abstract data visually, allowing an intuitive exploration of data to get insight, to draw conclusions and to interact directly with the data. The specification, analysis and evaluation of complex models and simulated model data can benefit from information visualization techniques by obtaining visual support for different tasks. This paper presents an approach that combines modelling and visualization functionality to support the modelling process. Based on this general approach, we have developed and implemented a framework that allows us to combine a variety of models with statistical and analytical operators as well as with visualization methods. We present several examples in the context of climate modelling.