It isn't much of a feat anymore to put weather maps and images on the Internet. It has clearly "been done" many times over. Despite the large number of sites offering such products however, or how extensive some of them are, there is still considerable room for improvement.
The result of two years of development, we have created an entirely new suite of web-based weather products that offer many improvements over existing such products. The areas of improvement include attention to legibility and interpretability including the combinations of fields, representations and colors chosen, increased interactivity (letting the user choose fields and representations to overlay, animation controls), 3-D representations of some fields, and in every case offering detailed descriptions of each product and field.
These factors are especially important when these products are used in the educational arena to instruct undergraduates and even high school students in the atmospheric sciences. When the audience consists of those who are learning, it is also especially important to not only provide the products, but also to explain what each product means, how to interpret it and describe the science behind it.
Unable to accomplish our goals with existing meteorological software packages such as WXP and GEMPAK, we developed our own meteorological graphics software for this purpose which, where useful, leverages existing packages. GEMPAK's powerful data ingest, and grid analysis and manipulation routines are used at the backend to gather and process the data. Low level NCAR Graphics calls are used to generate the graphics (and unlike most people who only use it to do simple black and white contour plots, we have exploited all of its powerful and highly customizable drawing features.) We have also added functionality to NCAR Graphics to allow the incorporation of satellite and radar imagery into the plots and have developed methods to output very high quality anti-aliased fonts for web graphics use. These components are tied together in an object-oriented scripting language (Perl) that enables rapid prototyping and customization of products because no lengthy FORTRAN compilations are necessary.
Web plug-ins, Java, and Java script are employed to enable interactivity and VRML brings selected products into the 3-D realm. Tight integration with the many educational explanatory resources on our Weather World 2010 server provides descriptions and explanations of each product.