Visual analysis of geospatial multivariate data for investigating radioactive deposition processes

The Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 raised awareness of the importance of radioactive deposition processes, especially for proposing aerosol measures against possible air pollution. However, identifying these types of processes is often difficult due to complicated terrains. This paper presents an application study for identifying radioactive deposition processes by taking advantage of visual interaction with topographic data. The idea is to visually investigate the correspondence of the spatial positions to the air dose rate along with relevant attributes. This is accomplished by composing scatterplots of pairwise attributes, onto which we project terrain areas to interactively find specific patterns of such attributes. We applied our approach to the analysis of air dose rate distribution data around the Fukushima nuclear plant after the accident. Our visualization technique clearly distinguished contamination areas derived from different deposition processes and thus is useful for elucidation of the deposition process.