I think that Tableau is a great tool to use to examine large databases.  Environmental data such as climate data (temps, precip, rainfall, etc) can be very large but many times is stored in compressed formats that make it hard to visualize.  In this example, I pulled a file out of my Everglades Restoration Project archives from about 7 years ago that is an interpolated grid of daily rainfall over the Lake Okeechobee area.

This Lake covers 730 square miles in southern Florida and is simulated in a variety of groundwater and surface water flow models.  The precip data set shown in the two-part video was created using actual data from a wide network of rainfall monitoring stations.  The purpose of the video is not really to examine the rainfall data itself in too much detail, rather the purpose is to show to transform and blend data and to create some simple animations in Tableau. The data set ended up to be reasonably big with over 6.3 million daily records needed to cover the 174 interpolations points for 99 years of record (1895-1993).

The two-part video series can be found here:

Rainfall over Lake Okeechobee Part 1

Rainfall over Lake Okeechobee Part 2

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