Decision makers are now trying to integrate meteorological data (analysis and model output available in formats like NetCDF) with societal data (in typical GIS formats like shapefiles or GeoTIFF). They usually have to find ways to convert the meteorological data into a compatible GIS format so they can be used in their GIS tools (e.g., ArcView). However, current GIS tools do not handle the time varying, multidimensional datasets that are often used in meteorological analysis and prediction very well and provide little support for time or spatial animation.

Many scientific display and analysis tools have GIS-like capabilities (overlay, georegistration), but do not have built-in ways to incorporate the typical GIS data formats. Additionally, open standards in the GIS community are providing access to GIS data on remote servers (WCS, WFS, WMS) and few of these tools support network access of data.

Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is the first comprehensive application built on the framework being developed at Unidata to meet the analysis and display needs of the community. The freely available IDV provides features of both standard meteorological display and analysis programs and GIS tools. It can display a wide range of meteorological (satellite, radar, surface, upper air, NWP) and other geoscience data concurrently with GIS data (shapefiles, GeoTIFF, WFS). Data can be accessed from local files or remote servers. In recent years, GIS tools have matured to provide analysis capabilities and the IDV supports many of these. Since, the IDV uses VisAD's universal data model which supports virtually any numeric data, it is easy for users to perform mathematical calculations between the (essentially 2-D) GIS and the (5-D) geoscience datasets.

We will provide an overview of the IDV and examples of integrating and manipulating data in GIS formats with geoscience (atmospheric, oceanographic, hydrologic) data using the IDV.