Complex scientific visualizations are becoming standard parts of many educational experiences, both in and out of schools. We found that satellite visualizations used by ocean scientists were difficult for teachers, students, and museum visitors to understand. The research reported on here documents some of those difficulties and explores alternate visualizations that proved more robust for novice users of the data. Five different visualizations of two ocean properties as sensed by satellites are shown and their affordances and constraints for both scientists and novice users are discussed. We illustrate the importance of incorporating culturally meaningful color representations and measurement scales for designing education materials using satellite data.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.