GIS Applications in Meteorology,

or Adventures in a Parallel Universe

BY SCOTT T. SHIPLEY

I
n my report to the Advanced Weather Interactive hydrometeorology. Instead of the variety of unique
Processing System (AWIPS) program in 1994, I data formats extant in the meteorological community
said, “GIS is too slow and will never have value for today, these data are revisited as common geographic
meteorological data processing.” Despite that sage ob- objects—either as points, lines (arcs), polygons, or
servation, GIS strategies have be-
come increasingly popular in me-
teorological applications, starting
with the adoption of open GIS data
formats by AWIPS, and recently
including the development of GIS
applications at NWS River Fore-
cast Centers and Weather Forecast
Offices. GIS strategies are now be-
ing extended into the imaging
stronghold of satellite meteorology
and remote sensing.
Key to the success of a GIS
strategy is the adoption of stan-
dards for data interchange and
interoperability, especially for
Web applications (e.g., Open GIS
Consortium, www.opengis.org). A FIG. 1. Rawinsonde tracks reveal extent of spatial offsets at higher alti-
tudes. Here, 100-hPa reanalysis by GIS (raster background) demonstrates
second factor is community accep-
a 5-m s−1 sampling error if these observations are assumed to be located
tance and adoption of common over the release point (squares). Intrinsic GIS functions were used, and
tools across disciplines (e.g., Com- no code was written.
mercial Joint Mapping Toolkit or
C/JMTK, www.cjmtk.com). The
GIS community is now evolving very rapidly with rasters as images or grids. Intrinsic GIS and externally
interfaces to Java, and, just recently, ESRI released a defined user functions are used to analyze these data
LINUX version of ArcEngine. objects, demonstrating that GIS is more than just a
Features of commercial, off-the-shelf GIS can be “tool for drawing maps”—the most common miscon-
exploited to address traditional problems and tasks in ception. Our hydromet community has evolved a “do-
it-yourself” strategy to develop the tools it has needed
AFFILIATIONS: SHIPLEY—Department of Geography, George to display and process hydromet information, prima-
Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and Raytheon, Upper rily because the hydromet data-processing tools did
Marlboro, Maryland not exist or were cost prohibitive to acquire. We now
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Scott Shipley, Senior Scientist,
face a decision either to embrace GIS as is, or adopt
Raytheon, 1616 McCormick Dr., Upper Marlboro, MD 20774
E-mail: Scott_T_Shipley@raytheon.com
its strategies in our emerging software systems—the
DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-86-2-171 main difference in outcomes being program risk and
cost, especially the logistical cost of software mainte-
©2005 American Meteorological Society
nance and documentation.

AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY FEBRUARY 2005 | 171

 A few examples illustrate where a commercial GIS
could meet or exceed the content of discipline/orga-
nization-specific applications, commonly referred to
as “stovepipes.” Consider the GIS analysis of rawin-
sondes released at 1200 UTC on 29 December 1998,
shown in Fig. 1 on the previous page, clearly reveal-
ing a polar jet shearing the raob tracks at higher alti-
tudes. Intrinsic (“out of the box”) GIS functions were
used to perform a reanalysis of the wind speed at 100
hPa, using the common assumption that the rawin-
sondes are located over their release points. This
analysis yields a sampling error ~5 m s−1 in wind speed
for regions of significant vertical shear, and ~20° in
wind direction at the entrance and exit regions of the
jets. This sampling error is similar in magnitude to
the measurement error assumed for rawinsondes.
Tests underway indicate that GPS sondes should vin-
dicate rawinsonde accuracy.
The NWS Office of Science and Technology/Systems
Engineering Center has adapted a NEXRAD-to-
Shapefile conversion utility to support NWS radar sit-
ing analyses using ESRI ArcView GIS with the Spatial
Analyst and 3D Analyst extensions. As shown in Fig.
2, the resulting ArcView GIS project computes and vi-
sualizes beam propagation and occultation over terrain
databases and supports the correlation of radar cover-
age with geographic census datasets. This GIS applica-
tion is used to identify the best locations for potential
radar installations and has been modified to depict Fed-
eral Aviation Administration weather radars. The con-

USING ARCGIS TO STUDY THE CORRELATION BETWEEN LIGHTNING STRIKE DENSITY AND TERRAIN ELEVATION
BYALEX J. DECARIA AND MICHAEL J. BABIJ
Department of Earth Sciences, Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania

With the widely used, off-the-shelf
software package, ArcGIS, we investi-
gated the correlation between cloud-
to-ground (CG) lightning strike density
and terrain elevation in southeastern
Pennsylvania. Lightning strike data for
the region from 1995 through 2001
FIG. SB1. Average annual lightning strike density (km−2 yr−1) for southeast-
ern Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2001.
were obtained at no charge, under
their research policy, from Vaisala, Inc.,
owners of the National Lightning
Detection NetworkTM (NLDN). The
NLDN is an array of over 100 sensors
spread throughout the continental
United States that uses time-of-arrival
and directional methods to locate CG
lightning strikes to within 1 km. The
data comprise the latitude, longitude,
time, and other parameters for each
strike and were in an ASCII format that
could be read directly into ArcGIS.
We calculated the average annual
density of lighting strikes (units of
km−2 yr−1) with the “density” function
of the Spatial Analyst extension of
ArcGIS (Fig. SB1), using a
1-km2 grid. We then compared the
density map with terrain elevation from
the U.S. Geological Survey’s National
Elevation Dataset, obtained from the
Pennsylvania Topographic and Geologic
Survey. The elevation data were
originally at a 30-m horizontal spacing
and were resampled to a 1-km
horizontal grid to be consistent with
the strike-density data.
Statistical analysis showed a weak,
but statistically significant, negative
correlation between terrain elevation
and lightning strike density over
southeastern Pennsylvania. Statistics
calculated for individual counties
showed either a weak, negative
correlation or no correlation between
lighting strike density and terrain
elevation. The lack of positive correla-
tion may indicate that orography is not
the primary mechanism for thunder-
storm formation over this region.

172 | FEBRUARY 2005

version utility has been updated to support negative el-
evation angles and theoretical beam patterns.
As discussed by Olga Wilhelmi in this issue, the
atmospheric science community has developed many
of its own visualization and application standards
[e.g., Grid Analysis and Display System (GraDs), Fer-
ret, National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR) graphics]. The tendency of each community
of users to build its own applications has the advan-
tage of focusing on discipline-specific issues, but limits
interactions with other research and applications
communities. These problems are beginning to be ad-
dressed by broader adherence to community standards.
I offer the following predictions to stimulate dis-
cussion. Now, remember that these are just forecasts,
and I am a meteorologist. Perhaps they will prove
more accurate than my 1994 prediction:
1) Pedigrees or “black belts” in meteorology will no
longer be prerequisite for anyone to use and ma-
nipulate hydrometeorological data. The imple-
mentation of geospatial interoperability standards
will dramatically increase the productivity of those
individuals who presently spend 50-plus percent
of their time writing code to convert data formats.
2) The weather community will eventually come up
to speed in GIS education. No job description cit-
ing “GIS” skill currently exists in the NWS. (Tra-
ditional geography departments are also behind
in GIS education, many reserving GIS topics for
graduate study, even though Earth system science
programs in secondary schools are using GIS.)
3) Web-enabled databases will transform how we use
and distribute weather data—that is, unless we
continue to embrace archaic data structures that
require special-purpose algorithms and impede
geospatial queries.
4) The Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5)
will not supplant netCDF as the format of choice,
but both will be challenged by a hybrid which
combines features from each. HDF5 has been se-
lected by the DoD to be a Joint Tactical Architec-
ture standard. NetCDF has not.
5) GIS will play a central role in monitoring climate
change. Evidence may be pointing toward land
use as a large factor in climate change, perhaps
dominating greenhouse explanations of tropo-
spheric temperature rise in the last century. If this
is so, GIS techniques will be needed to track land-
use/land-cover changes on a global basis.
AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY
FIG. 2. Theoretical beam coverage patterns for NEXRAD
radars located in Washington State and Oregon. Beam
blockage is depicted for terrain obstacles, where beam
height is located within one vertical beam width of sur-
face elevation. Graduated color (red) is used to show
percentage beam blockage for cases of grazing incidence.
FOR FURTHER READING
Pielke, R. A., Sr., G. Marland, R. A. Betts, T. N. Chase, J.
L. Eastman, J. O. Niles, D. Niyogi, and S. Running,
2002: The influence of land-use change and land-
scape dynamics on the climate system: Relevance to
climate change policy beyond the radiative effect of
greenhouse gases. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London A.
Special Theme Issue, 360, 1705–1719.
Reed, B., S. Shipley, J. Stauch, D. Gillespie, M.Walth, S.
Young, C. Wang, J. Mulligan, J. Overton, J. Zajic, and
A. Goldberg, 2004: Application of GIS for data qual-
ity monitoring in the NPOESS Ground Data Process-
ing System. 20th International Conf. on Interactive
Information Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorol-
ogy, Oceanography, and Hydrology, Seattle, WA,
Amer. Meteor. Soc.
Shipley, S. T., I. A. Graffman, and J. K. Ingram, 2000: GIS
applications in climate and meteorology. ESRI Inter-
national User Conf., San Diego, CA, ESRI. [Available
at http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/pro-
fessional/papers/PAP159/p159.htm.]
——, ——, and R. E. Saffle, 2005: Weather radar terrain
occultation modeling using GIS. 21st International
Conf. on Interactive Information Processing Systems
(IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrol-
ogy, San Diego, CA, Amer. Meteor. Soc.
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