ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Weather

Weather Forecast add-in for ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:42:00 GMT

The other day we posted about how you can find and use ArcGIS Explorer add-ins from ArcGIS Explorer Labs. Last night the weather was bit crazy in Redlands with high winds. And on the news this morning were reports about a big storm hitting Denver. So we decided we'd take a closer look at one of the add-in in Labs - the Weather Forecast add-in which uses weather services from Weather4Webs.com and a placefinder service from geonames.org. This unsupported sample was built by Dara Burlo, one of the ArcGIS Explorer product engineers.

First, as described in the earlier post, go to the Labs group and grab the Weather Forecast add-in. After you add it you'll see something like this on your add-ins tab:

Click the add-in, and you'll see a dialog open. Use the button to click on the map.

Under the hood the coordinate location is obtained via the mouse click, and using the geonames API the nearest city is found. You'll see the city name displayed (above we clicked in Redlands, CA).

Then choose from 1 to 7 day forecasts (the default is a 5 day forecast) and click Find Forecast. The city name is passed to weather4webs, which returns the desired forecast for the location you pointed to.

Explorer on The Weather Channel

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:55:00 GMT

This Weather Channel article reviews the 2008 severe weather season, and makes for a very interesting, if sobering, read.

We noted that the 4th graphic in the article shows ArcGIS Explorer displaying a tornado path across downtown Atlanta, and was produced by the National Weather Service.

Weather Today, Weather Yesterday

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:26:00 GMT

NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center publishes tornado, wind, and hail reports on a daily basis, as well as offers an historical archive of past events. Under reports you can find the current storm reports, and also search back in time to retrieve previous reports. The reports are delivered as .CSV files, one of the formats that can be imported directly in ArcGIS Explorer.

Here's yesterday's hail reports shown in Explorer. By clicking on the report location we can view additional information, and can see there was golf ball size hail reported near El Paso, Texas, mostly pea-sized hailstones in Rosita, Colorado, and quarter-sized hail covering the ground near Elizabeth, Colorado.

And here's what the hail report looked like a year ago yesterday. There were many more hail events reported, and the hailstorms stretched from the Oklahoma panhandle through eastern Kansas, across the southeast corner of Nebraska, and on into Iowa and parts of South Dakota and Minnesota.

To make the maps, we downloaded the .csv file with the events that we wanted from the NOAA Web site. Once we saved the .csv file locally, we used File > Import and opened the file.

Using the Import Text File Wizard, most of the defaults worked perfectly. On the first panel we just accepted all of them (after looking at Data Preview to make sure things looked ok), and clicked Next...

On the second panel most of the defaults were exactly what we wanted, but we made two additions. First, we chose the Location field from the .csv file as our Title Field. This is what we wanted to be displayed as the hover text, and is also the title of the popup window. We also chose Comments as the field from the .csv file to use in the Description. This is what we wanted shown in the popup window contents.

And here's the final result:

See the File Import Wizard Help topic for more information on importing files.

Weather Delay at Logan

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:51:00 GMT

Here's a map that speaks for itself.

At this moment there is an average flight delay of 175 minutes at Logan International Airport due to weather.

Real-time radar weather from weatherbug.com (ArcIMS service), real-time airport delays from guiWeather.com (KML).

Liven Up Explorer with Live Content

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:16:00 GMT

Labor Day Weekend is approaching, there's a heat wave in southern California, and clouds and even some raindrops seem to be all around. A likely escape for a long weekend getaway is one of the nearby National Parks, perhaps Yosemite. But what about the weather?

Here's a quick little mashup of a couple of different services, showing real-time weather published by the Pennsylvania State University through the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access site, along with live Web cam feeds from Yosemite National Park.

The weather is an ArcIMS service, and when we opened it in Explorer we set the service to update every 15 minutes, so we'd be seeing the latest weather conditions at regular intervals since late summer storms move quickly through the Sierra.

The Yosemite Web cams are published at the Yosemite Association Web site. We created several notes (using the Create Notes task) and entered the URL to the Web cams in the note text box.

Unfortunately the Web site didn't publish the exact coordinates for the cams, but it did describe their locations. We added the Physical Features layer from the new Resource Center to our map, since it includes the 1:24000 scale topo maps for the US. We used the cam placement descriptions and the topo maps to locate each Web cam push pin. The cams are not at their exact physical locations, but close enough for our needs.

Finally, to organize things, we used the new Add Folder capabilities for results to group all of them under one "Yosemite Online" note. We also added links to the note that point to the National Park Service and Yosemite Association Web sites.

We've exported the note, and emailed it around to everyone on the team so they could open and see the same live cams and weather information in Explorer.