A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations. GIS sometimes refers to geographic information science (GIScience), the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems.
A digital elevation model (DEM) is a 3D CG representation of a terrain's surface – commonly of a planet, moon, or asteroid – created from a terrain's elevation data. A "global DEM" refers to a Discrete Global Grid.
A coverage is the digital representation of some spatio-temporal phenomenon. ISO 19123 provides the definition:
System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses is a geographic information system (GIS) computer program, used to edit spatial data. It is free and open-source software, developed originally by a small team at the Department of Physical Geography, University of Göttingen, Germany, and is now being maintained and extended by an international developer community.
GRIB is a concise data format commonly used in meteorology to store historical and forecast weather data. It is standardized by the World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Basic Systems, known under number GRIB FM 92-IX, described in WMO Manual on Codes No.306.
Currently there are three versions of GRIB.
Version 0 was used to a limited extent by projects such as TOGA, and is no longer in operational use.
The first edition is used operationally worldwide by most meteorological centers, for Numerical Weather Prediction output (NWP).
A newer generation has been introduced, known as GRIB second edition, and data is slowly changing over to this format. Some of the second-generation GRIB are used for derived product distributed in Eumetcast of Meteosat Second Generation. Another example is the NAM model.
ArcGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) for working with maps and geographic information. It is used for creating and using maps, compiling geographic data, analyzing mapped information, sharing and discovering geographic information, using maps and geographic information in a range of applications, and managing geographic information in a database.
gvSIG is a geographic information system (GIS), that is, a desktop application designed for capturing, storing, handling, analyzing and deploying any kind of referenced geographic information in order to solve complex management and planning problems. gvSIG is known for having a user-friendly interface, being able to access the most common formats, both vector and raster ones. It features a wide range of tools for working with geographic-like information.
Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (Weka) is a suite of machine learning software written in Java, developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License.
An hydrological transport model is a mathematical model used to simulate river or stream flow and calculate water quality parameters. These models generally came into use in the 1960s and 1970s when demand for numerical forecasting of water quality was driven by environmental legislation, and at a similar time widespread access to significant computer power became available. Much of the original model development took place in the United States and United Kingdom, but today these models are refined and used worldwide.
The HBV hydrology model, or Hydrologiska Byråns Vattenbalansavdelning model, is a computer simulation used to analyze river discharge and water pollution. Developed originally for use in Scandinavia, this hydrological transport model has also been applied in a large number of catchments on most continents.
Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, forms a separately-licensed option component of the Oracle Database. The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph aid users in managing geographic and location-data in a native type within an Oracle database, potentially supporting a wide range of applications — from automated mapping, facilities management, and geographic information systems (AM/FM/GIS), to wireless location services and location-enabled e-business. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model (NDM) graphs used in traditional network applications in major transportation, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in social networks and social interactions and in linking disparate data sets to address requirements from the research, health sciences, finance, media and intelligence communities.
TerraView is a GIS application built on the TerraLib GIS library. TerraView handles vector data and raster data, both of them stored in a relational or geo-relational database, including ACCESS, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle Spatial. TerraView has a visualization interface that allows attribute and spatial queries on object in geographical database. The interface allows different views on the database, producing thematic maps with different types of legends.
ParaView is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) libraries. ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.
Giovanni (meteorology) - Web interface that allows users to analyze NASA's gridded data from various satellite and surface observations.
Geographic information systems (GISs) have become a useful and important tool in the field of hydrology to study and manage Earth's water resources. Climate change and greater demands on water resources require a more knowledgeable disposition of arguably one of our most vital resources. Because water in its occurrence varies spatially and temporally throughout the hydrologic cycle, its study using GIS is especially practical. Whereas previous GIS systems were mostly static in their geospatial representation of hydrologic features, GIS platforms are becoming increasingly dynamic, narrowing the gap between historical data and current hydrologic reality.
VisIt is an open-source interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.
The Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS) is an interactive desktop tool that is used for easy access, manipulation, and visualization of earth science data. The format of the data may be either binary, GRIB, NetCDF, or HDF-SDS. GrADS has been implemented worldwide on a variety of commonly used operating systems and is freely distributed over the Internet.
NetCDF is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidata program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). They are also the chief source of netCDF software, standards development, updates, etc. The format is an open standard. NetCDF Classic and 64-bit Offset Format are an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium.
EMIGMA is a geophysics interpretation software platform developed by Petros Eikon Incorporated for data processing, simulation, inversion and imaging as well as other associated tasks. The software focuses on non-seismic applications and operates only on the Windows operating system.
It supports files standard to the industry, instrument native formats as well as files used by other software in the industry such as AutoCAD, Google Earth and Oasis montaj.
There is a free version of EMIGMA called EMIGMA Basic developed to allow viewing of databases created by licensed users. It does not allow data simulation nor modeling nor data import.
The software is utilized by geoscientists for exploration and delineating purposes in mining,
oil and gas
and groundwater as well as hydrologists,
environmental engineers,
archaeologists
and academic institutions
for research purposes. Principal contributors to the software are R. W. Groom,
H. Wu, E. Vassilenko,
R. Jia, C. Ottay and C. Alvarez.
