What is GIS?
A geographical information system (GIS) is a collection of hardware, software, and data that is used to capture, store, analyze, manage, and visualize geospatial information.
GIS tools are broadly used by decision makers, stakeholders, emergency responders and disaster mitigation planners in the private sector or applications communities: agriculture, energy and water resources, humanitarian organizations, emergency management, etc. The interoperability among GIS products is what makes them so desirable.
The user communities that are adept at using GIS data would like to include atmospheric weather and climate information in their applications, but cannot because that data are rarely available in GIS-compatible formats. Likewise, the community of Earth scientists has not tapped into the vast resource of GIS data because the various analysis tools and data formats are incompatible. GrADS has some new features that are intended to bridge the gap between these two disparate formats – gridded weather and climate data and GIS data – so that all the interested user groups may take advantage of the broad scope and flexibility of both approaches.
GIS Data Formats
GIS data are portrayed in two formats: (1) Vector data (such as the shapefile) that represent points, lines, and polygons, and (2)
Raster data (such as GeoTIFF images) that represent a regularly spaced matrix of continuous values that are geospatially referenced. The Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is also used to express geographic annotation and visualization for vector and raster data in GIS browsers such as Google Earth.
GIS-Compatible Output From GrADS
The new GrADS-GIS interface includes options to create output in both raster and vector formats.