The History of Meteorology and Cartography

Chris Little @chris-little of the UK Met Office gave a presentation on the history and future of maps and weather cartography.

A video of the talk is available here.

In my presentation, which tried to show how the various sciences are constrained, and enabled, by technology development (data standardisation, collection, processing, disemination), the key slides are 58 to 62. And if you only want to look at one slide, 62. Unfortunately, as I had to use a PDF, the explanatory notes that went with each slide disappeared.

Meteorology, at present and for the foreseeable future, does not need centimetre or second precision for location or time, so web maps, rather than the specialised GIS maps, may be good enough. So I am interested to know whether people think GIS type accuracy will make it into web maps?

So I am interested to know whether people think GIS type accuracy will make it into web maps?

I think it could, if we define appropriate coordinate systems.

I am curious though as to why you think layers are not fit for met applications? layers are a traditional paradigm, part of WMS, WFS, etc. Most maps have at least one layer

Peter, I am happy to have an abstract Layer, like a database ‘view’ or categorical view into information. It is the idea of a coordinate orientated layer that is ‘broken’. Coordinates are intrinsically a continuum, so layers organised by those attributes are always too many (potentially infinite) of potential interest.

Does that make sense?

Yes, the concept of layer is definitely abstract, but is a potential primitive. In our proposal, it means “has a shared coordinate system with its sibling elements”