TY - JOUR
T1 - Web-based real-time visualization of large-scale weather radar data using 3D tiles
AU - Lu, Mingyue
AU - Wang, Xinhao
AU - Liu, Xintao
AU - Chen, Min
AU - Bi, Shuoben
AU - Zhang, Yadong
AU - Lao, Tengfei
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. This work is supported by a research project from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41871285) and the Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (No. 164320H116).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - Weather radar data play an important role in meteorological analysis and forecasting. In particular, web-based real-time 3D visualization will enable and enhance various meteorological applications by avoiding the dissemination of a large amount of data over the internet. Despite that, most existing studies are either limited to 2D or small-scale data analytics due to methodological limitations. This article proposes a new framework to enable web-based real-time 3D visualization of large-scale weather radar data using 3D tiles and WebGIS technology. The 3D tiles technology is an open specification for online streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets, which is designed to improve rendering performance and reduce memory consumption. First, the weather radar data from multiple single-radar sites across a large coverage area are organized into a spliced grid data (i.e., weather radar composing data, WRCD). Next, the WRCD is converted into a widely used 3D tile data structure in four steps: data preprocessing, data indexing, data transformation, and 3D tile generation. Last, to validate the feasibility of the proposed strategy, a prototype, namely Meteo3D at https://202.195.237.252:82, is implemented to accommodate the WRCD collected from all the weather radar sites over the whole of China. The results show that near real-time and accurate visualization for the monitoring and early warning of strong convective weather can be achieved.
AB - Weather radar data play an important role in meteorological analysis and forecasting. In particular, web-based real-time 3D visualization will enable and enhance various meteorological applications by avoiding the dissemination of a large amount of data over the internet. Despite that, most existing studies are either limited to 2D or small-scale data analytics due to methodological limitations. This article proposes a new framework to enable web-based real-time 3D visualization of large-scale weather radar data using 3D tiles and WebGIS technology. The 3D tiles technology is an open specification for online streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets, which is designed to improve rendering performance and reduce memory consumption. First, the weather radar data from multiple single-radar sites across a large coverage area are organized into a spliced grid data (i.e., weather radar composing data, WRCD). Next, the WRCD is converted into a widely used 3D tile data structure in four steps: data preprocessing, data indexing, data transformation, and 3D tile generation. Last, to validate the feasibility of the proposed strategy, a prototype, namely Meteo3D at https://202.195.237.252:82, is implemented to accommodate the WRCD collected from all the weather radar sites over the whole of China. The results show that near real-time and accurate visualization for the monitoring and early warning of strong convective weather can be achieved.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85084793248&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/tgis.12638
DO - 10.1111/tgis.12638
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85084793248
VL - 25
SP - 25
EP - 43
JO - Transactions in GIS
JF - Transactions in GIS
SN - 1361-1682
IS - 1
ER -