Visual comparator: An interactive tool for dynamic spatiotemporal comparative visualizations

The visual exploration process often requires comparisons between multiple visualizations, either from the same dataset or a different one, to identify relationships and patterns. This visualization process, referred to as comparative visualization, is valuable for analyzing multivariate, multispectral, or multidimensional data.

The existing tools that facilitate visual comparisons do this by three means: juxtaposition (placing visuals side by side), superposition (overlaying visuals), and explicit encoding (visualizing a derived quantity corresponding to the relationship being studied). While superposition is ideal for static, geospatial datasets, where spatialization is a key component of the data, the spatiotemporal nature of Earth science datasets presents a challenge with comparative visualizations.