Consider your options for looking up local weather conditions. Do you use an Internet website? Perhaps you have installed weather software on your desktop? Regardless of the source, you must consider if it was built on a robust, industrial-strength GIS engine. If not, the way you are currently predicting and monitoring weather threats may not be as sophisticated as you think – or as accurate as you need to stay safe.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of activity in the computerized mapping industry, known as Geographic Information Systems (or GIS for short). Advances in Internet-based GIS platforms and the rapid adoption of broadband have allowed countries, states, and cities to start distributing geographic datasets of their territories through their own websites. The availability of geographic data has never been greater.
That’s why the integration of weather software and GIS is a natural fit. In fact, many government and private weather agencies have been harnessing these advances to provide more accurate, more timely weather information to their customers by distributing weather data in standardized GIS formats.
When it comes to weather tracking, here are some of the advantages of using GIS-enabled weather software:
1. Accuracy in weather prediction and monitoring
With high resolution mapping software, accuracy is automatically increased. Knowing precisely where the weather threats are in relation to your location is a must when you are responsible for the safety of people or property.
2. Integration with standardized GIS formats
Millions of datasets comprising petabytes of data already exist in the form of standardized GIS formats like ESRI Shapefiles, Digital Elevation Models, GeoTIFF, and Geographic Markup Language. A modern-day GIS engine would support all of these formats giving you the flexibility to combine basemaps and foreground layers with weather data.
3. Repurposing weather conditions for specific uses
Anyone who is serious about weather tracking needs the ability to customize how weather data is rendered. GIS applications usually contain sophisticated rendering engines for customizing the appearance of data – the shapes, colors, labels, and transparency of each layer.
4. Collision-detection and alerting
Another important reason why GIS software makes the most effective weather monitoring solution is its built-in ability to detect collisions (intersections) between various shapes and layers inside a dataset. For weather software, the benefit is clear: detect weather threats immediately at precise locations before they reach you.