The National Weather Service is developing a four dimensional weather data cube that will incorporate present and forecast weather data into a single authoritative cube. The Data Cube will consolidate disparate sources of weather data under a Service Oriented Architecture for retrieval and exploitation. While the initial user will be the Federal Aviation Administration, the Data Cube will eventually be the primary provider of weather data to almost all users and consumers, both government and commercial.

The primary focus of the Data Cube is providing information for machine-to-machine processes. However, there is currently no provision for most end users to actually visualize this new 4D data other than existing 2D images. ITT Visual Information Solutions has developed a tool to allow weather data consumers the ability to view three spatial dimensions (x,y,z) over time in a 4-D paradigm. This tool allows users to ingest gridded and vector weather data, extract specific meteorological parameters (e.g. wind shear, relative humidity, icing), and produce visualizations of current and forecasted weather. Typical displays of meteorological data include animations of a 2 dimensional parameter, such as temperature at a specific altitude. The ITT VIS Weather Workbench allows flexible access to the 3rd dimension of data via interactive 3-d visualizations. The data can be analyzed over time at the point, slice or image level. ITT VIS' Weather Workbench (WxB) will allow the end user full access to weather data such as forecasts and historical meteorological databases available on the internet. Other modalities of data connectivity such as webservices and streaming data are currently being enabled. Potential applications include aviation flight planning, agricultural and military weather forecasting, airplane crash reconstruction, and academic model analysis. An overview of the software architecture uses cases and scenarios, and prototype demonstration will be presented.