Interactive map highlights world weather and climate extremes

President's Professor Randy Cerveny recently added a new feature to the World Weather / Climate Extremes Archive, a web site sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and managed by Dr. Cerveny.

The site, which lists global weather and climate extreme records, now includes an interactive map showing the locations of verified occurrences. The map was developed by students in a GIS III (GPH 573) course taught by Associate Professor Elizabeth Wentz .

Using the interactive map of the world, a user can choose to display the locations of world, hemispheric and continental records for temperature, air pressure, rainfall, hail, aridity, wind, tornados or cyclones. Through a Google mapping interface, the user can zoom in to any location, and can change the background from a political map to satellite imagery.

In order to create the final interactive map, Students in the GIS III course designed and constructed an xml database, designed and developed icons for each weather type, and carried out javascript programming, all under the guidance of Dr. Wentz.

The new map adds a visual component to the Weather / Climate Archive, which was developed following a unanimous agreement by the WMO Commission for Climatology (CCI) OPAG 2 group to create a world archive for verifying, certifying and storing world weather extremes. The archive provides a valuable resource for study of climate change.

Before a record is included on the site, it is evaluated by a committee consisting of the WMO CCl Rapporteur for Climate Extremes (Dr. Cerveny), the chair of the OPAG 2 group, the chair of the overarching CC1 group, a regional authority, and as necessary an authority associated with the specific type of record.

Students who helped develop the interactive map were: Ashish Kumar Agrawal, Elyssa Gutbrod, Min Jo Kang, Scott Kelley, Won Kyung Kim, Myunghwa Hwang, Shea Lemar and Terry Song.