In this paper we present a visualization system VisualEsse, that is built as a part of the Environmental Scenario Search Engine (ESSE). We need to interactively render data from various sources over the surface of the Earth of two similar classes: gridded data and geolocated images. Gridded data are a scalar or vector two- dimensional arrays of points usually (but not always) aligned with meridians and parallels with a constant step for latitude and longitude; each dimension of the gridded data array has hundreds of points. Geolocated image is a high resolution image (thousands by thousands pixels) with mapping to latitude and longitude defined for each pixel. Currently we use only one type of geolocated images: DMSP satellites visual and infrared images.
Visualization system provides two applications: MS Windows application based on NASA World Wind and web applications built upon Microsoft Virtual Earth Control. Both applications allow researcher to show data arrays and images exported by web-services and to pre-process the data before visualization.
The ESSE visualization engine is easily extensible not only for the new data sources, but also for the new types of visualization. At the moment our module supports color maps, isolines and vector fields for gridded data rendering and texturing of the Earth surface with geolocated images possibly with transparency effects.