Data Visualization
GIS is more than just mapping. A variety of tools exist in ArcGIS that allow you to chart and graph your data, and use those visualizations to interact with your mapped data. New capabilities also allow you to map, analyze, and interpolate data in 3- or 4-D. By leveraging Python libraries such as Matplotlib or developing apps with the ArcGIS API for Javascipt, many additional avenues are available for advanced data visualization.
And of course you can also build beautiful, insightful, and dynamic maps.
Find Patterns in Complex Data
Every day, the National Weather Service is generating hundreds of weather warnings, watches, and advisories for their forecast areas. Using the Pairwise Intersect tool can begin to make sense of the millions of forecast polygons if they're simplified into more meaningful spatial aggregations, such as the hexagons used in this map.
The Pairwise Intersect tool makes it easy to create informative maps such as predominance or frequency.
Simplified Analysis of Multidimensional Raster Data
We have all run into the situation where the temporal cadence of our data is not ideal for our analysis, such as trying to create seasonal composites from hourly or daily data. The Aggregate Multidimensional Raster tool greatly simplifies that process.
In this image we can see summertime mean land surface temperatures from Aqua/MODIS satellite data that is useful in being able to visualize the extent of urban heat islands.
Aggregate is just one of many tools in the Multidimensional Analysis toolset.
Understand Patterns Across Time
ArcGIS Pro has an incredibly useful charting tool for timeseries data called a Data Clock. It allows you to structure and visually inspect patterns in temporal data. The Data Clock is also interactive with any mapped version of the data, making it easier to understand spatio-temporal patterns.
This data clock shows Brazilian Amazon wildfires - we can see seasonal increases in the summer, along with much higher frequencies of events in the mid-2000s, and again in the late 2010s.
A Deeper Dive into Time
Understanding temporal patterns is always a challenge, and being able to explore time in greater granularity is extremely helpful. Another charting capability in ArcGIS Pro is the Calendar Heat Chart. Here we can break down frequency across multiple time dimension, allowing you to see patterns that might occur within a year, a month, a week, or a day.
Are Things Getting Better or Worse?
Understanding trends in climate data is a primary objective for many analyses. Using the Space Time Pattern Mining toolbox, we can easily analyze huge datasets, assign a specified spatial or temporal structure, and get statistics on trends and areas of emerging concern.
Here we can see areas with high frequency of tornadoes (bright red) along with statistically significant increases in annual trends (yellow outline) or decreases (blue outline).
Begin to understand areas of vulnerability by enriching with information about elderly populations or the number of mobile homes.
Assessing Frequency and Risk
Decades of wildfire perimeters were analyzed using the Count Overlapping Features tool to understand how many times a single area was impacted by fire.
The resulting polygons could then be styled based on frequency and enriched with demographic information, including population, median home values, businesses, etc.
The GIS for Climate Hub is maintained by Esri staff in collaboration with our partners in climate science. Explore more of these partner activities and applications on the Science at Esri website.
To suggest additional content, please contact environment@esri.com.