Visualizing Sunlight Radiation in the Arctic Ocean

Abstract

The Arctic is experiencing dramatic environmental transformation due to rising temperatures and melting ice, which are affecting its environment, wildlife, and human communities. Remote sensing technologies (e.g. satellites) are increasingly being used to understand environmental change in the remote and understudied Arctic Ocean across broad spatial and temporal scales, generating vast data sets that require interactive visualization to be dynamically explored. We present a prototype visualization that uses aggregation means on different zoom levels to allow exploring a 200GB data set on sunlight in the Arctic Ocean, which consists of monthly time series of coastal pixels, photosynthetically available radiation (PAR), light attenuation coefficient (KPAR), and PAR estimated at the seafloor (PARBOTTOM) from 1998 to 2018. Our main example-the analysis of trends in sunlight radiation levels along the west coast of Greenland-exemplifies our tool's value for marine biologists to getting a concise and interactive overview of sunlight radiation levels, which allows studying potential impacts on the Arctic ecosystem.