Exploration and Estimation of North American Climatological Data

The availability of spatial and temporal earth data is increasing; for example, NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) will soon be producing a terabyte of earth data per day. This data will permit more detailed exploration and analysis of earth systems than was possible in the past. One application of particular interest to the authors is the estimation of contour surfaces from point values and the visualization of these surfaces in map form. The authors explored a multivariate data set of approximately 6,000 points in North America and other global locations. Each point contains climatological and other information such as temperature, elevation and precipitation. Spatial correlation was modeled using a semivariogram and several estimation approaches were used to create estimated surfaces and resulting contours. Maps of these results and comparisons between different approaches will be presented.