Uni- and Multi-modal Uncertainty Visualization in 2D Scalar Field Ensembles

Abstract

The aim of uncertainty-aware scalar field visualization is to convey the most likely case, but also the uncertainty associated with it. In scientific simulations, uncertainty can be modeled using an ensemble approach. Statistics are then drawn from the ensemble outcome to compute the most likely case and its uncertainty. However, the statistical distributions do not necessarily need to be uni-modal. We present an approach to visualize uncertain 2D scalar fields that extends existing uni-modal distributions based on colored heightfields and 2D glyphs to multi-modal ones. We compare the approaches by conducting user experiments for both the uni- and multi-modal case.