Over the past five years the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been involved in an independent study directed towards the creation and dissemination of time critical meteorological products specifically tailored for mobile devices. The PDA Animated Weather (PAW) service was designed to be a technology demonstrator for current and ongoing research being conducted at SSEC. The site contains a collection of real-time products designed to be independent of platform and communications provider. Products are a blend of traditionally observed, measured, and computed fields which are enhanced using remotely sensed derivatives.
To further advance the PAW, the use of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant Web Map Services (WMS) is being tested. This will not only open the possibility for more products to be input (including non-meteorological data), but it will also broaden the range of compatible desktop computer applications and mobile devices as the output is automatically scaled to suit client display requirements. Three areas being investigated will be reported on: 1) WMS: A variety of satellite products are being served as WMS using GeoTIFF formatted images, Shapefiles, and KML objects depending on the type of product. 2) User Interface: A generic browser based user interface is being designed that can be used on desktop/laptop (point and click) and mobile smart phone devices (touch). 3) Notifications: For products that trigger real-time events, there is the ability to send notifications via email and Short Message Service (SMS) for a user-defined region of interest. Also, an iPhone application has been written using the inherent GPS for user location and the APNS (Apple Push Notification System) for alerting the user.
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