Development of Open Source Functionality for the Analysis and Visualization of Remotely Sensed Time Series

The GEONETCast data dissemination system delivers low cost environmental data to users worldwide. Long time series of images from various satellites can be obtained to study dynamic phenomena. To explore the dynamics, displaying the images as animation with few controls is a common practice. However, some problems need to be addressed. We present how the current approach to animate time series of satellite images can be improved by pre-processing (pixel co-registration and resampling data from sattelites with different spatio-temporal resolution), by analytical functionality (detecting features of interests and feature tracking) and by enriching the visualization environment with more interactive functions. But even then, animations still lead to information overload. We discuss our attempts to reduce this problem, and describe the resulting software component that is fully dedicated to visual exploration and analysis of dynamic phenomena and will be added to the open source ILWIS software.