Product Highlight: Weather and Climate Toolkit

March 3, 2007 Enterprise Alabama Tornado Visualization

Weather and Climate Toolkit visualization of the March 3, 2007 tornado in Enterprise, Alabama.

NCDC’s Weather and Climate Toolkit (WCT) provides simple visualization and data export of the weather and climate data archived at the Center, including radar, satellite, ground-based, and model data. Built upon scalable, open-source, and community-driven software, the WCT is both free and platform-independent making it easily accessible to a variety of users in the private, research, educational, and government sectors.

The WCT provides tools for custom data overlays, background maps, animations, and basic filtering. It also allows export of images and movies in multiple formats. The WCT’s export feature supports data conversion to a variety of formats, including Shapefile, Well-Known Text, GeoTIFF, ESRI Grid, and Gridded NetCDF, allowing easy integration into common software packages such as ArcGIS, Google Earth, and MatLab. Additionally, the WCT provides advanced data export support for Google Earth that enables the 2-D and 3-D rendering of data and isosurfaces. 

The WCT has been used in a variety of projects including accident investigations, severe weather studies, broadcast meteorology, meteorite studies, fraud detection, and more. The WCT’s unique qualities allow users to extend and further develop the software thereby tailoring it specifically for their application, which allows easy and effective utilization of weather and climate data.

Check out the Weather and Climate Toolkit to see how you can visualize NCDC’s weather and climate data. See the Weather and Climate Toolkit Tutorial for in-depth instructions on using this tool.