A Comparative 3D Visualization Tool for Observation of Mode Water

Mode water forms a 3D region of seawater mass, which has similar physical characteristics values. Research and observation of mode water have a long history in physical oceanography because analysis of mode water brings the understanding of various natural phenomena. There have been various definitions of mode water, and comparison of mode water regions extracted with such various definitions is an important issue in this field. This paper presents our study on comparative 3D visualization tool for the comparison of mode water regions. We extract pairs of outer boundaries of mode water regions as isosurfaces and calculate dissimilarity values between the pairs. The tool visualizes the multi-dimensional vectors of the dissimilarity values by Parallel Coordinate Plots (PCP) and provides a user interface to specify particular pairs of mode water regions so that we can comparatively visualize the shapes of the regions. This paper introduces our experiment on a comparison of mode water regions between an observation and a simulation datasets using the presented tool.