Starting to play with spatial-temporal data

Thinking  the big picture is a different thing to actually implement it :-) Well, who doesn't know that. Having some hydrological time-series (groundwater levels) in place in a sensor observation service (SOS), the hydrogeological all-in-one-wonder-portal is going to get a glance of the next level :-p
The last weeks I started to play around with the R environment for statistical computing and visualization (The R Project). 52°North developed a neat R toolkit to access and digest SOS time-series - sos4R.

It is well documented and pretty easy to connect to a SOS server, and query observations. So for the fun of it and to demonstrate the general feasibilty, I quickly queried the groundwater levels of the Horowhenua area in New Zealand, where I got some sample data (courtesy by the regional council).

With the R sos4R, fields and akima packages from the CRAN R packages archive I (quite coarsely) interpolated the groundwater surfaces for the years 1991-2009 and put the images together as an animated gif (meters above mean sea level over time).

Discussion

I am aware of the total uselessness of this particualr way presenting :-) No years, the scale changes slightly, and the exact spatial extent and north orientiation are not reliable :-p

Nevertheless, for just playing around, this was a motivating simple first shot to easily visualise changes over time.

I would like to play around with the gstat and spacetime R package, integrate a more sophisticated script as a 52°North WPS process and have those things happening automagically in the interwebz.