ABSTRACT
Although there is a growing body of literature on how people interpret graphical displays, few studies to date have examined how people apply domain knowledge to make inferences from complex graphical displays. Meteorology is an excellent domain in which to investigate these questions, because the displays in this domain can be quite complex and because they are typically used to make predictions about future weather conditions. Weather forecasting depends both on the ability to understand the current weather conditions from a map, and the ability to apply knowledge of meteorological principles to make predictions about how these weather conditions will change in the future.
