EnvirVis2024

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WeaVA: Weather Event Characterization Based on Citizen Reports
(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Haessig, Dominique; Yang, Haiyan; Pajarola, Renato; Diehl, Alexandra; Dutta, Soumya; Feige, Kathrin; Rink, Karsten; Nsonga, Baldwin
Observations of weather captured by citizens represent a novel and unique data source that can complement other authoritative sources, such as remote sensing, and help detect and characterize high-impact weather events. This work proposes a visual tool that characterizes weather events by visually analyzing online citizens' reports gathered by MeteoSwiss, the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology. Our solution supports the visual exploration of selected features like weather event categories and intensities through time and space. It presents a novel clutter-free bubble map visualization that facilitates an easy exploration and quantification of weather reports. It allows the analysis at different zoom levels, supporting multiple interactive exploration features such as synchronous or asynchronous event histogram comparisons, clutter-free pie-chart map visualizations, and animations. We illustrate our approach with a series of use cases and findings. We performed a user study with domain experts from the national weather services in Switzerland, Austria, and Argentina to evaluate our tool's expressiveness, effectiveness, and easiness of use. We also list the benefits of our design, future work, and limitations.