Product Description
What is GIS?
What is GIS used for?
GIS for Weather Analysis
GIS Data Formats
Sources of GIS Data

Product Description
RadarLabGIS is an advanced weather radar analysis tool that allows individuals concerned with severe weather to quickly and easily track its position, movement, and history. RadarLabGIS makes it easy to locate storm cells and identify areas experiencing heavy rain, hail, and other severe weather. The system also allows meteorologists and other weather professionals to easily study meteorological events in great detail and precision. RadarLabGIS combines weather data processing ability with GIS technology to allow study in unprecedented detail and precision.

What is GIS?
GIS stands for Geographic Information System and basically refers to a system of software, hardware, and data that allows the user to manipulate, analyze, and display information that is geographically significant. GIS does not refer to a specific software vendor or package, but instead to the general practice of associating all data with a spatial location and allowing the user to view and manipulate that data in relation to a geographical area.

What is GIS used for?
GIS provides a useful set of tools for planning, decision-making, operations management and inventory. GIS is now being employed in a wide range of applications including urban and regional planning, environmental risk analysis, forest management, hazard analysis, emergency response, marketing, transportation planning, wildlife management, agriculture, and health care management.

GIS for Weather Analysis
The RadarLabGIS package extends the reach of GIS into weather analysis by combining traditional GIS features with the ability to display and analyze geo-referenced radar data, satellite imagery, and surface observations downloaded in real-time from a dedicated WeatherTAP data source. This type of analysis is particularly useful for those concerned with how weather affects a particular geographic region. Weather forecasters, emergency managers, event planners, public service managers and construction planners are just a few examples of those who must be concerned with how weather affects a particular geographic region.

GIS Data Formats
GIS data can take many forms; however, for static data, that is data that does not rapidly change with time, such as road paths, city locations, etc., the most popular format to emerge is the ESRI shapefile format. RadarLabGIS can import and use ESRI shapefiles.
The term "shapefile" is usually used to indicate a single set of data; however, a shapefile usually consists of more than a single file. Typically, a shapefile will have three physical files. All three files share the same name, but will typically have extensions of .shp, .shx, and .dbf.

One important fact to remember about shapefiles is that each file can only contain one type of geographic "entity." There are only three possible types of geographic entities: point entities (a city location for example), an area entity (a bounded 2-D region like a county), or a line entity (like a road path for example). Most shapefiles have additional information, or metadata, about each record in the shapefile. For example, a shapefile containing city locations (point entities) may also have a database that gives the name, population, and state of each city.
Dynamic data, or data that changes rapidly with time such as radar data, satellite images, etc., are automatically downloaded and processed by RadarLabGIS.

Sources of GIS Data
There are many sources for GIS data, many freely available to the public. RadarLabGIS comes bundled and pre-configured with a large amount of GIS data including cities, states boundaries, county areas, airport locations, interstates, and major highways. Depending on your license type, additional shapefiles may also be imported and used. Shapefiles may be freely downloaded from the web. Many government agencies such as the USGS, FAA, NWS, and DOT offer free shapefiles for download from their websites. Many state and local governments also have shapefiles available for free or for purchase. Private companies such as ESRI also offer large libraries of shapefiles for purchase.

For more information, e-mail us or call 800-337-5263.