A 3DWeb Application for Weather Forecast Based on WebGL

Abstract

Management, interpretation and visualization of geoscientific and atmospherical information is a major problem for the geoscientist and for a correct diffusion, due to its high volume, complexity, spatiotemporal dimension and three-dimensional nature. As a result, development of software tools for integration, exploration and graphical analysis of the growing amount of available geodata is of great importance. In the last decade a trend towards the implementation of these tools as web applications has consolidated because of its benefits: universal access, permanent availability and ease of collaborative use. However until recently Web development technologies have been ill-equipped for implementing interactive 2D and 3D applications dealing with large amounts of data as required by many geoscience applications. The support of WebGL by most modern browsers has changed this situation and promises to revolutionize the Web in the next few years with a new generation of visually appealing, high performance interactive applications. In this work we describe the technologies for 3D Web and their use in the context of atmospherical data using a 3D weather information application as case study.