Part 3: Visually Explore Carbon Parameters

NOTE: Part 3 is optional. It gives you an opportunity to examine pre-selected data images in another visualization tool.

The New Media Studio (NMS) in Santa Barbara, California builds interactive educational tools for exploring data. For this chapter, NMS built a custom data visualization tool that allows you to visually overlay carbon-related datasets. You can examine how different datasets are related by "blending" their images. The data viewer allows you to turn different data layers on and off and adjust their transparency levels.

1. Access the visualization tool in a new window by clicking this Custom Data Viewer link. On the New Media Studio page, click the link in the center of the page for the Land Cover and Lightning Data Viewer.

   NOTE: The Data Viewer requires the Shockwave plug-in. If your browser doesn't have it installed, the site will make it available for you to download.

The data viewer shows three different types of carbon-related data images:

• NDVI is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index-it shows how much green plant life is present on land, an indication of carbon moving from the atmosphere to the biosphere. Areas that are white show the lowest amount of green plant life. Increasingly higher amounts of green plants are indicated by tan, yellow, and green. The highest amount of plant life is indicated by dark green.
• PSN shows net productivity of vegetation on land as well as in the ocean. This is called net productivity because it indicates how much carbon dioxide is taken in by vegetation during photosynthesis minus the amount that is given off during respiration, the process by which organisms use food to produce energy. White areas show the lowest productivity. Increasingly higher productivity is indicated by black, purple, blue, green, yellow, and orange. Red areas show the highest productivity.
• The Lightning images show the locations of recorded strikes. Lightning strikes are responsible for starting many fires that release carbon dioxide stored in plant materials back into the atmosphere. Pink spots indicate the lowest number of strikes. Increasingly higher numbers of strikes are indicated by purple, blue, green, yellow, and orange dots. Red indicates areas of the highest number of lightning strikes.
2. Set the bottom layer to NDVI March 2000 and the top layer to PSN March 2000. Manipulate the Data Blender sliders to look for patterns between the two parameters.
• Are the areas with the most green plants also the most productive?
  
• What difference can you notice between desert areas and the ocean?
  
• Which areas of the ocean are most productive?
  
3. Set the bottom layer to NDVI March 2000. Set the top layer to NDVI March 2001. Adjust the data blender to visualize the difference between 2000 and 2001.
• What may be responsible for any differences you observe?
4. Move the lightning opacity slider to see where lightning strikes occur compared to the most productive areas.
• Does this relationship you see indicate that lightning is attracted to green plants? Explain your reasoning.
5. How does this type of visualization tool compare with the time series animations you created in Part 2? Describe the type of information that you can get using this type of visualization tool.

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This type of visualization tool allows you to visually compare two different parameters at the same location without having to compare images side by side. It also allows you to visualize change over time by blending the images rather than animating them.

You can save the data viewer to your own computer. Choose File/Save As... and choose Source. For information on how you could build or order data exploration tools such as the data viewer, check out New Media Studio's Data Discovery and Toolkit.