A comprehensive study of the Earth System and its related processes requires a holistic examination and understanding of multi-dimensional data acquired with a large number of different sensors or produced by various models. To this end, the Digital Earth project developed a set of software solutions to study environmental datasets using visual approaches.
The Digital Earth Viewer is a component-wise scalable web-based framework for simultaneous visualisation of multiple heterogeneous data sources. It helps contextualise mixed observation and simulation data in time and space by creating a virtual 4D environment for the user to explore.
The software was conceived as a hybrid application split into a server back-end and a client front-end. The server back-end can be hosted remotely for access through the internet or locally for offline usage. The client front-end can be accessed using any popular web browser without the need to install any other software components.
Currently, general-purpose-sources are implemented for the netCDF, ESRI ASCII Grid, GeoTIFF and CSV file formats, as well as facilities to load data from WMS or Maptile-servers or to interact with SQLite databases. Specialised sources have been built to read and display Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) data, GPX tracks, and further application-specific formats. As the Digital Earth Viewer is under constant development, new sources and functionalities are being added all the time!
The Digital Earth Viewer is licensed under the EUPL license and everyone can access the source code from our repository.
You can download a version for your favourite OS from our releases page (and check out the user manual!), or visit one of the following public demos:
The main instance of the Digital Earth Viewer displays diverse preloaded showcase visualizations and has access to multiple sources for every supported data type.
Main Instance
The public instance for the GLoDAP Application Case has preloaded gridded and point data that including temperature as well as a myriad other biogeochemical variables like salinity, oxygen, phosphate, and total alkalinity.
GLoDAP InstaceThe public instance for the Sediment Plume Application Case displays marine data from turbidity and current sensors and from numerical models on top of a high quality bathymetric profile.
Sediment Plume Instance
Further web-based components and techniques for data visualisation were developed under the Digital Earth Project and are available under the following link: