A bit of a broad question, but I'm interested in visualizing parameters (like temperature, salinity, or chlorophyll) across a transect and depth (this is for marine / oceanographic data).
I've seen some cool looking contour plots that show this quite well, but I'm not quite sure where to start to begin preparing data to play with in R and try to make some figures. Any suggestions would be great!
QGIS has several gridding algorithms. You create contours from grids (generally xyz data on a regular or irregular spaced grid). Surfer is a commercial package that makes excellent grids and contours.