Visualization of power system wide-area, time varying information

An ongoing challenge in power system research is how to best utilize time-varying power system data and ultimately how to present it to human operators and planners in a concise and understandable way. This paper presents two newer visualization techniques for time-varying data across wide-area networks, including (1) animation loops that combine periodic snapshots of the grid into time lapse videos defined across geographic areas and (2) sparklines which summarize trends in time varying data as word sized line plots. Examples for each visualization technique are presented and their implementation issues discussed.