This web application was created by NOAA's National Coastal Data Development Center to facilitate coastal observational data discovery, access, and display. The coastal observations are grouped into one of three possible categories: surface marine measurements, physical oceanographic measurements, surface land measurements. The sample graphic shows the project path of Hurricane Ivan.

The coastal observations are grouped into one of three possible categories: 1) surface marine measurements, such as wind speed and direction, air temperature, and significant wave height; 2) physical oceanographic measurements, such as water temperature, salinity, and current speed and direction; and 3) surface land measurements, such as wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and tendency, air temperature, and current weather conditions. The resulting assimilation of observational data are automatically added into a geodatabase (Oracle and ESRI's ArcSDE) on an hourly basis. Internet users are provided with a customized interface containing a set of simple tools for page manipulation and menus for data selection and mapping. They can retrieve the last 48 hours worth of data for any particular station, generate labels based on different types of observational measurements at different times on the map interface, and access the latest observations from any particular location via a mouseover function. Marine and land surface weather observations are acquired from the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) developed by NOAA’s Forecast Systems Laboratory. Physical oceanography measurements are obtained from internet servers maintained by the data providers. National Hurricane Center tropical cyclone positions are obtained from the Unisys website.

This standard viewer provides a variety of GIS data layers of various themes and focus. This viewer is useful for comparing spatial data from a variety of scientific disciplines.

This site does not request any internet downloads or plug-ins.

http://www.ncddc.noaa.gov/COOS/GIS_Mapping