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There's a lot to like about Digital Atmosphere. To begin
with, it can import just about every conceivable
meteorological data format.
- Metar
- Synop
- SAO Airways
- TEMP (Upper Air Format)
- NHC hurricane bulletins
- SPC convective outlook
- NEXRAD WSR-88D level 3
- NCEP frontal bulletins
- GRIB
- Fleetcode
- SFUK lightning
- ESRI shapefile
In other words, just about any meteorological data you
access can be imported into Digital Atmosphere, analyzed, and
charted. Digital Atmosphere Professional adds over 500MB of
high quality aeronautical basemaps of North America and charts
with detail of 1:500K! The end result is astonishing power and
flexibility in weather charting and analysis.
Digital Atmosphere also offers a powerful and flexible data
downloading at no charge. With just a couple of mouse clicks,
you can easily access all of the data you need from the
Internet as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 - Data is retrieved from the
Internet at no charge, and it's fast!
Once you've downloaded the data that interest you, you're
ready to plot and analyze using those data. You can plot
temperature, relative humidity, pressure, frontal boundaries,
radar, and any other data that you've downloaded. In fact,
it's possible to chart so much data that you end up with a
cluttered weather map. To alleviate this problem, Digital
Atmosphere provides the ability to alter the density of the
map plots. This allows you to create a map with exactly the
data you want clearly displayed.
Figure 2 - A typical weather chart in
Digital Atmosphere. Click for a larger image.
In addition to real-time data, Digital Atmosphere also
allows you to analyze past weather events. You can chart
tornado tracks for any year between 1950 and 2002, and
hurricane tracks are available for years between 1850 and
2002. Hurricane tracks can also be downloaded (as well as
cyclone tracks), but there is no way to access tornado tracks
beyond 2002.
Weather Graphics offers another service for those needing
historical data. For a fairly hefty fee, Weather Graphics will
send you a hard drive jammed full of a plethora of historical
weather data. Such a service is not necessarily aimed at the
hobbyist. Instead, it's targeted at amateur and professional
meteorologists. This service is an indication of the
full-service nature of Weather Graphics for weather
enthusiasts.
Advanced users can use the capability to edit analysis
scripts in cases where the included scripts don't suffice. The
standard version of Digital Atmosphere is limited to 50
defined script commands while the professional version offers
an unlimited number of commands.
Weather radar data is also available in Digital Atmosphere,
and using the high-resolution basemaps in the professional
version, users can plot radar down to the major street level.
GPS functionality is also available in Digital Atmosphere, so
if you're a storm tracker, you can easily plot your location
in relation to the weather. However, if your goal is to see
weather radar of your community and track storms from the
comfort of your home, you can get better weather data from
someplace like WeatherTAP.
We used Digital Atmosphere over a fairly long period of
time without any difficulties. However, we did have a problem
updating our copy to the latest version. Weather Graphics
doesn't provide download links for product upgrades for the
professional version. Instead, you're asked to click their
Content Us link and provide information, after which they will
send you directions for updating your copy. However, when we
clicked the Contact Us link, we were taken to a page that
didn't display. Instead, our browser reloaded twice a second
until we manually stopped it. We sent a message to Weather
Graphics asking for assistance, but that message was never
answered. Given the many positive reviews of customer service
from Weather Graphics, we assumed that our experience was a
fluke. Indeed, we recently received a message from Weather
Graphics apologizing for the delay in response.
All in all, Digital Atmosphere is an excellent weather
charting application that has no equal. It's comprehensive and
it produces top-quality weather charts with limited effort.
With a slight improvement in the updating process, Digital
Atmosphere would be easier to recommend highly, but even with
that glitch, we still feel that Digital Atmosphere is a must
have application for anyone who needs the ability to chart and
analyze weather patterns with ease.
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