GIS applications in meteorology, or adventures in a parallel universe

FEBRUARY 2005 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | n my report to the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) program in 1994, I said, “GIS is too slow and will never have value for meteorological data processing.” Despite that sage observation, GIS strategies have become increasingly popular in meteorological applications, starting with the adoption of open GIS data formats by AWIPS, and recently including the development of GIS applications at NWS River Forecast Centers and Weather Forecast Offices. GIS strategies are now being extended into the imaging stronghold of satellite meteorology and remote sensing. Key to the success of a GIS strategy is the adoption of standards for data interchange and interoperability, especially for Web applications (e.g., Open GIS Consortium, www.opengis.org). A second factor is community acceptance and adoption of common tools across disciplines (e.g., Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit or C/JMTK, www.cjmtk.com). The GIS community is now evolving very rapidly with interfaces to Java, and, just recently, ESRI released a LINUX version of ArcEngine. Features of commercial, off-the-shelf GIS can be exploited to address traditional problems and tasks in hydrometeorology. Instead of the variety of unique data formats extant in the meteorological community today, these data are revisited as common geographic objects—either as points, lines (arcs), polygons, or