Visualizing Uncertainty in Natural Hazards

“Presenting data without error rate is misleading”. This is a quote from the O.J. Simpson defense team regarding the presentation of DNA evidence without valid error rate statistics. Taken more generally, this practice is a prevalent shortcoming in the scientific and information visualization communities where data are visualized without any indication of their associated uncertainties. While it is widely acknowledged that incorporating auxiliary information about data, i.e. data quality or uncertainty, is important, the relative amount of work in this area is small. On the other hand, developments by the geographic, cartographic, and GIS communities in this regard is much more concerted. Some of the early efforts were spearheaded by the participating members of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) initiatives (Beard et al. 1991; Goodchild et al. 1994), where different methods of displaying and animating data with uncertainty were proposed. An excellent summary of this body of work can be found in (MacEachren et al. 2005). Combining these works with those from the information and scientific visualization communities, a typology for uncertainty visualization was presented which tries to map data, uncertainty, and tasks with the appropriate visual presentation (Thomson et al. 2005). Specifically, the typology for uncertainty visualization would give the user some guidance about the visual representations for the different types of uncertainty.