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19 - Scientific visualization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

David M. Glover
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
William J. Jenkins
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
Scott C. Doney
Affiliation:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
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Summary

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Why scientific visualization?

Throughout this book we have used a number of MATLAB's graphical capabilities as tools to monitor the progression of our mathematical and numerical travails, to demonstrate some characteristic of our results, or to reveal underlying relationships in data. Our emphasis now will be on the basic process of scientific visualization and providing you with some advice on how to effectively use (and not abuse) the many tools available to you. You may think that scientific visualization is an easy and natural thing to do, especially given the relatively powerful and reasonably intuitive tools built into MATLAB and other “point and click” packages so readily available. However, in the many years that we have been attending conferences, reading journals, and perusing text-books, we have encountered some ghastly instances of computer graphics abuse (or more to the point, abuse of the poor viewer/reader). This is a shame, because invariably the presenter has worked hard, often under difficult circumstances, to acquire scientific data, execute a model, or discover an erstwhile hidden relationship … only to fail to communicate the final result effectively. After all, isn't communication the final end-product of all our scientific endeavors?

We could also regale you with the awe-inspiring size of today's huge data sets, but rest assured that tomorrow's will be even more impressive.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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