Interactive data visualisation for effective communication - an opportunity to present your data in an engagingly visual way to relevant stakeholders at the touch of a button is now available.

"The portal is amongst the most capable, attractive and professional web interfaces for viewing climate data from space"

Jon Blower, Director of Science, Institute for Environmental Analytics

Data Visualisation

The volume of project data is often vast, and identifying and presenting or sharing the relevant data in a way that means something to stakeholders, can be difficult. Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s webGIS portal is designed to be as easy-to-use as possible, is affordable and does not require any software installation, thereby giving access to non-specialist users.

Delivering Impact

The portal is already proving a very effective tool with several EU-funded projects, as well as with commercial industry clients and can include any geospatial research output from any scientific domain e.g. disease vectors, forest health, remotely sensed data, model outputs or in situ measurements. Examples and references are available.

Interactive examples

Smaller screens warning

The visualisation tool works best on larger screens; it does work on mobiles and smaller tablets but for the best experience please use a computer with a 13" monitor or greater

ESA Climate Change Intiative Ocean Colour

Ocean colour is one of 15 essential climate variables that ESA's Climate Change Initiative investigated. The data gathered from multiple satellite missions since 1997 is presented using the web based visualisation tool

Launch Example

Global Hydrological Cycle from eartH2Observe

The eartH2Observe project is a €11M EU funded project that aims to contribute to the assessment of global water resources through the use of new Earth Observation datasets and techniques, and to construct a consistent global water resources reanalysis dataset of at least 30 years.

Launch Example

Sea Surface Temperature from Readingi Uni

This example demonstrates a two year subset of sea surface temperature data provided by the University of Reading.

Launch Example

How to use the GIS Portal

Finding & Selecting an Indicator

Browse Indicators

Indicators are initially displayed grouped by type; expand the drop down list to view the available indicators, click on one to show it on the map. You can change the way that indicators are grouped for a different view.

Search Indicators

If you know the name of the indicator you are looking for simply start typing in the search box and matches will be displayed; click on a search result to show it on the map.

Refine Your Selection

When the indicator that you have selected is available in more than one variant you will be presented with a number of choices to refine your selection and identify the exact variant to show on the map.

Viewing & Analysing the Data

View the Data

Once selected, an indicator will be displayed as the top layer on the map, with the most recent time slice visible. Click and drag to move the map around, use the zoom buttons find the area you are interested in, and use the timeline to move around in time.

Select an Area

On the Layer Analysis tab click either 'Draw Polygon' to create a rectangular bounding box, or click 'Draw Irregular Polgyon' to create a multisided bounding box that closely matches the area of interest.

Create a Graph

Optionally define a bounding box, select the type of graph to create (currently timeseries or Hövmoller), then specifiy the temporal range that the graph should display, and click 'Create Graph' to view the plot. Try adding multiple bounding boxes, or multiple indicators, to compare areas and/or indicators

Instructional Videos

A Basic Introduction

This 20 minute video will give you an introduction on how to use the portal and the features that are available

A Guide to the Buttons

Display Options - change the base map, chose to show or hide international boundries and graticules

Stored Graphs - when you create a graph they will be stored here for the duration of your session

Hide Tools - Minimises the tools panel so that you can see more of the map

Full Screen - displays the map in full screen mode without the browser toolbars or the tools panel; click again to exit full screen mode

Zoom In - view the map in finer detail by zooming to show a smaller area. You can also zoom using the scroll wheel on your mouse.

Zoom Out - view a larger area of map. Again, you can zoom out using the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one.

Hide Layer - hides the layer on the map, but keeps the layer details intact

Show Layer - makes a hidden layer visible again

Layer Settings - view and change the scalebar, turn on or off logarithmic or auto-scaling, change the layer opacity or scale pallette

Layer Information - view details of the data provider, spatial and temporal coverage of the data and other meta data

Layer Analysis - draw bounding boxes and then create a graph or download data

Remove Layer - remove the layer and the layer information from the map

Draw Polygon - click once on the map to mark one corner of the rectangle, move the mouse to show a preview, and then click again to finish drawing.

Draw Irregular Polygon - click once on the map to start drawing, click as many times as required to create the desired area.

Download data - optionally define a bounding box, then specify a temporal range to download data in netCDF format