ParaView Geospatial Tutorial

Welcome to the ParaView section of the Geospatial Data Visualization tutorial. Make sure that you have completed the "Geospatial Data Gathering, Cleaning and Conversion" part first.

First, open the csv_data.csv file with ParaView. Don't forget to click Apply! Then go to the Information tab and make sure the X, Y and Z values have the "double" Data Type. It should look like this:

Now we're ready to visualize the data. Go to Filters->Alphabetical->Table To Points. Click Apply. You should see a straight line on the screen. This is because we haven't selected the dimensions we want to visualize yet. Under the Properties tab, select X Column and choose X. Do the same for Y and Z. Click Apply again. You should see a sphere! Rotate it and see if resembles the continents on Earth.

Finally, we want to learn something about the data. For example: "Where did the heaviest meteorites fall?". Fortunately, ParaView makes it very easy to visualize this! In the TableToPoints object, in the Properties Section, find Coloring. Replace "Solid Color" with mass. Since mass is a number, ParaView notices the points can be colored based on the value. The problem is, virtually all of them are since they weigh so little compared to the few heavy ones. This is what our current visualization is like:

You might be thinking, "there has to be a better way", and you're right! ParaView can use a logarithmic scale instead, which makes a lot more sense with our data. To enable it, select Edit below Coloring. A panel should appear on the right side. Find the checkbox "Use log scale when mapping data to colors" and select it.

Voila! We have visualized 50,000 meteorites based on their mass. There is a few more variables in the data, play with them to see what else you can learn from the dataset. Please submit your feedback for this tutorial here.