Cli-Mate is an interactive multi-touch application for the visualization of climate data. Developed to explore new interaction modalities with the goal of enhancing scientific data visualization, Cli-Mate enables discovery. By demonstrating new user-interface design strategies for multi-touch tables, Cli-Mate brings users together as collectives able to more efficiently interact with the data at hand, as well as each other.

Cli-Mate interfaces with a visualization and analysis tool called Ferret, allowing researchers to do side-by-side analysis of related datasets. Computational scientist Christopher Kerr, of the Princeton University NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, is working with Argonne National Laboratory to port the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) to Argonne’s Intrepid computer system. EVL graduate student Ed Kahler developed Cli-Mate in collaboration with Kerr. Cli-mate is being used to simultaneously assess and confirm Intrepid’s POP with Levitus datasets. Users can select and compare time steps, levels and parameters, review animations and, using transparent contour maps and overlays, easily compare results. Future work includes porting other existing visualization tools to Cli-Mate, and updating user interfaces to leverage the full potential of multi-touch environments.