NCSA EasyViz and DataBridge Tutorial

Visualization of Macrozooplankton Biomass

CalCOFI Cruise Data, 1990-2004

The Tutorial

Lesson 1: Creating a Three Dimensional Surface To Represent Two Dimensional Data

This is the first of two lessons. In this lesson, we want to create a 2-dimensional visualization of plankton biomass during the month of October, 2001.

> The first step is to use NCSA DataBridge to convert an ASCII text file into an EasyViz format file.The CalCOFI web site has made their data readily available to the public. You can view an example of the data in the table format provided by the CalCOFI project, in this case data of Macrozooplankton Biomass measured at dozens of points off the coast of southern California between 1990 and 2004.

Let's consider this data for a moment. In any web browser, you may save this file as an html file and open it in a number of applications including Microsoft Word and Excel.

EPIC Education Data Portal, SDSC Education Group, 2005