“MeteoGIS”: GIS-based system for monitoring of meteorological phenomena for local authorities

MeteoGIS in an operationally working software that allows meteorological information to be accessed, visualized, and analysed in a GIS environment. The system has been developed in Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMWM) for local authorities in Poland. The main tasks of the system include: monitoring of current weather phenomena, generation of user-specific meteorological warnings, and support for analyses of both current and historical meteorological situations.

The system monitors precipitation intensity and accumulation, precipitation type, wind velocity and direction, and lightning. The meteorological data comprise real-time data and nowcasts up to 6 hours ahead. The data sources are IMWM measurement and processing systems such as: POLRAD (weather radar network), NIMROD (weather radar data processing and precipitation nowcasting), PERUN (lightning detection system), COSMO-LM (NWP model), and telemetric rain gauge network. Spatial data resolution is 1 km and input data are downscaled in case of poorer resolution. Temporal resolution depends on time-interval of the data delivery (radar data are available every 10 minutes).

MeteoGIS is composed of the manager window and visualization windows with meteorological fields (theme layers) and geographic maps (overlays). The user controls all operations by means of the system manager, especially data management and schedules carried out by the system. The following schedules are available: data gathering, calculation of precipitation accumulation (using spatial and temporal interpolation), data copying to archive, and warning issuing.

Generation of warnings is one of the most important tasks of MeteoGIS. They comprise current information on potentially hazardous meteorological phenomena (current and forecasted for the next few hours). The system automatically generates warnings according to user's requirements when value(s) of selected meteorological field exceeds preset threshold(s).

Data analysis is carried out not only through visualization, but also by means of statistical analyses, advanced SQL-queries, and GIS techniques.

The users of the system are neither meteorologists nor hydrologists, but governmental employees (Centres for Crisis Management). Therefore, MeteoGIS was designed in such way that most of operations are automatic, and work with it is simple, basing on user's intuition.