Creation and Manipulation of Meteorological Products for Mobile Devices

The PDA Animated Weather (PAW) is a free on line service provided by the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC). This service provides a collection of Meteorological image products specifically formated for dissemination, display and manipulation on hand held mobile web active devices. Clients rely on standard web browser functionality to view and animate these image fields. Frame mapping provides a device independent user interface allowing users to control image resolution (zoom), geographic coverage (roam), parameter overlay (plotted and contoured) and channel selection (satellite, radar, model).

Over the past 5 years, the PAW product suite has expanded to include datasets from local, national and international sources. The primary source of these data is the SSEC Data Center which provides access to its real time archives of global satellite imagery, model fields and conventional observations. Off site data sources include the National Severe Storms Labs (NSSL) and UCAR-Unidata.

Products are routinely produced by a set of automated scripts which collect and render the source data into standardized geographic projections and resolutions. Users can traverse multi-layered image channels to view atmospheric features re-projected to constant perspective. Additional data observations can be plotted over the image data. These graphical overlays illustrate important geo-referenced features/regions and can provide the links to point/area specific products.