The weather and climate toolkit

The WCT is free, platform independent software distributed from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The WCT allows the visualization and data export of weather and climate data, including Radar, Satellite and Model data. By leveraging the NetCDF for Java library and Common Data Model, the WCT is extremely scalable and capable of supporting many new datasets in the future. Gridded NetCDF files (regular and irregularly spaced, using Climate-Forecast (CF) conventions) are supported, along with many other formats including GRIB, NEXRAD, AREA and GINI.

The WCT provides tools for custom data overlays, Web Map Service (WMS) background maps, animations and basic filtering. The export of images and movies is provided in multiple formats. The WCT Data Export Wizard allows for data export in both vector polygon/point (Shapefile, Well-Known Text) and raster (GeoTIFF, ESRI Grid, VTK, Gridded NetCDF) formats. These data export features promote the interoperability of weather and climate information with various scientific communities and common software packages such as ArcGIS, Google Earth, MatLAB, etc.

The WCT also supports an embedded, integrated Google Earth instance. The Google Earth Browser Plugin allows seamless visualization of data on a native 3-D Google Earth instance linked to the standard 2-D map.