The NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit

The NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit (WCT) is an application that provides simple visualization and data export of weather and climate data archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and other organizations. The WCT is built on the Unidata Common Data Model and supports defined feature types such as Grid, Radial, Point, Time Series and Trajectory. Current NCDC datasets supported include NEXRAD Radar data, GOES Satellite imagery, NOMADS Model Data, Integrated Surface Data and the U.S. Drought Monitor (part of the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)). The WCT Viewer provides tools for displaying custom data overlays, Web Map Services (WMS), animations and basic filters. The export of images and movies is provided in multiple formats. The WCT Data Exporter allows for data export in both vector polygon (Shapefile, Well-Known Text) and raster (GeoTIFF, Arc/Info ASCII Grid, VTK, NetCDF) formats. By decoding and exporting data into multiple common formats, a diverse user community can perform analysis using familiar tools such as ArcGIS, MatLAB and IDL. This brings new users to a vast array of weather and climate data at NCDC.