Interacting with Datasets

SOS Explorer® contains a subset of the NOAA Science On a Sphere catalog of datasets. There are a few different types of datasets and they play (and update) a little differently. To get a list of the datasets that are available for SOS Explorer® visit the SOS Dataset Catalog.

Depending on your set-up, you can either use a mouse, trackpad, or touch screen to rotate the globe and pinch to zoom in as desired to explore the data.

Animated data consists of a directory of images or a video that plays data often over time. With animated data, you can use the Animation Window controls in the upper right of the screen. In this window, scrub quickly through the animation using the slider bar, play and pause, move one frame at a time backward or forward with the single arrow buttons, go to the beginning and the end with the double arrow buttons. You can also change the Playback Speed (FPS) dropdown value.

The full list of SOS Explorer® datasets included in a Complete Installation can be found on the Dataset Catalog with SOS Explorer® selected as the platform.

Single images are datasets that are made of one image. You can rotate and zoom in on the globe. A great dataset example is Hurricane Tracks: Cumulative - 1950 - 2020.

Animated data consists of a directory of images or a video that plays data often over time. With animated data, you can use the Animation Window controls in the upper right to move through or change the speed of the data. A great example of this is Atmospheric Chemistry: GEOS - 5 Model.

Real-time datasets, when kept up to date, show near-real-time information by downloading new frames often. See below for instructions on keeping them up to date.

Narrated movies are often not maps, but rather a movie with narration that wraps around the globe. These were made for Science On a Sphere, which is why they are spherical rather than flat videos, therefore, they aren’t necessarily ideal for the SOSx flat screen experience. However, they are wonderful movies that were made for SOS and so we decided to include them. A great example of this is Eating Water: Agriculture and Climate Change.

Tours are listed in the dataset menu usually as “Tour - …” and are typically many datasets put together as a story. They include text, images, videos and other media to provide context to the datasets. A great example of this is Tour

• The Pandemic and Air Quality.

We also have a few datasets that are either more like a video game - we call these “Experiences,” where you might pilot an underwater rover or learn safety tips during a tornado. In addition, we have included Saturn with Rings as well as a 3D Aurora.

360 Media of National Marine Sanctuaries are bubbles that can be entered in order to experience a 360 degree underwater photo. And some of our finest expressions of 3D and real-time data combined are our Satellite Models and Satellite Positions. The majority of these only come with a Complete install, which will take up 165 GB of space on your computer.