Digital Earth Viewer

The Digital Earth Viewer is a web-based tool for the visualization and exploration of geospatial timeseries data. It can load data from files such as CSV, netCDF, GeoTIFF, shapefiles or SQLite databases, but also from online sources like OpenStreetMap or WMS servers. It provides a Google-Earth-style 3D globe visualization in which the user can simultaneosly view data from different sources. This contextualization can help with aiding understanding complex datasets. Users can scroll through timeseries, navigate on the globe and query or graph selected data. As the viewer is provided as a single 25MB executable with no dependencies besides a modern web browser, it can be quickly deployed and used both in the field as well as in the lab or even in hosted contexts. Scenes can be viewed either on a regular monitor, in anaglyph 3D or on projection domes. As data is extracted, reprojected and pyramidized at runtime, no lengthy preprocessing is needed. The application is licensed under the EUPL v1.2 and thus can be freely used and extended.

Several online showcases are hosted:

• The GLODAP project shows measurements over terrain from GEBCO.net. It also contains early gridded versions of the GLODAP data as part of a quality control study.
• The Mining Impact project shows a simulated dust cloud over a sonar scan of terrain. This data is fused with sensor measurements from a real dust cloud with similar parameters to the simulation.
• The Digital Earth Showcase B: Methane projects data of methane outflow and an animated wind-indicator. This includes location of methane-releasing wells.

Watch video

A short introduction to the viewer was given at EUROVIS2021:

Digital Earth Viewer: a 4D visualisation platform for geoscience datasets (link to Youtube)

Examples

Examples of the Digital Earth Viewer.