Environmental Conditions Affect Businesses-and Decisions Because the company is serving out bigger datasets to accommodate more requests, using cloud services makes WDT’s servers scalable at critical times. WDT is also launching a time-enabled global forecasts map service that will provide both daily and hourly forecasts for all the normal weather variables-temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and direction-out to 10 days. For example, users can loop through the last 60 minutes of radar data to see where a storm has been and where it is headed. WDT is currently doing a lot with time-enabled map services. Our datasets increase in size then because there is more radar data accumulating, and our customers need access to that data.” This extra demand normally happens when the weather changes and storms begin to develop. “It also provides us with load balancing-that is, we can redistribute the many requests we receive for weather data and map services between our servers. “AWS provides us with reliability because if something goes wrong, we can easily replicate ArcGIS on another machine in the cloud,” Gaffner said. If it doesn’t work, then we stand up another instance and try something else.” Using the ArcGIS Amazon Machine Image (AMI) capability, we can easily stand up a version of the server in the cloud and try something new-like using different machine hardware specifications or configuring data services differently-to see if it works or not. “For one thing, it allows us to implement the ‘fail faster’ mantra. With cloud services, the company can stand up multiple machine instances of ArcGIS Server to determine the operational stack that runs the best. “There are so many advantages available to us by using Amazon Web Services,” Gaffner pointed out. The company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy the analytical and mapping services that ArcGIS Server provides. “This allows our users to quickly add past, present, and future weather data to their maps and apps.” It also enables WDT’s partners that build apps for specific vertical markets, such as utilities, to add weather data to their apps using WDT’s map services.Ĭloud computing is key to WDT’s operations. “One of the great things about the ArcGIS Server platform is that it’s extremely easy to publish live, dynamic, rapidly updated data and then host it as a service for use with other applications,” said Gaffner. The company currently uses ArcGIS Server to develop all its map services for customers, though it plans to upgrade to ArcGIS Enterprise later this year. “Over the years, we have assembled an archive of almost half a petabyte of weather data.” Analyzing Clouds in the Cloud “The amount of data that we collect is enormous, about one terabyte per day,” said Matt Gaffner, GIS solutions expert at WDT. WDT provides weather forecasting and mapping services to many industries: energy corporations to help them predict electrical outages and keep offshore oil rigs safe agriculture agencies for crop insurance freight transportation companies to aid with route design and concert and sporting event organizers for planning and safety. (WDT), uses advanced GIS from Esri to better organize and analyze this big data. Researchers continually refine their instruments and processes to better understand the climate and make more accurate weather forecasts.Įsri partner Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. But more data doesn’t necessarily translate into improved predictions.īecause of the size and complexity of weather patterns, they can be very difficult to predict more than a few days in advance. With an abundance of satellites and remote-sensing devices monitoring weather systems all over the world, meteorologists now have more data available to them than ever before.
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