A powerful and easy-to-use weather display tool for PCs and Macs

The Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS) serves a wide variety of weather data customers, from K-12 students to emergency managers to senior research scientists. To visualize both real-time and archived weather data, OCS software engineers have developed an infrastructure for visualization and decision-making support (e.g., GIS tools) on the latest Windows-based and Macintosh-based operating systems.

The presentation will focus on the ability of a customer or a service provider to customize data display using an eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML tags are used to obtain updating weather data from a server as well as static, geo-referenced data for overlays and underlays. In addition, the authors will present the benefits of the OCS tools over traditional GIS software for viewing weather data.