Storm chasing

So far, we created a simpler version of what the NextBus website already does. We have done it in a way that ultimately gives us complete control over the output. Now, we want to use this control to go beyond what the NextBus Google Maps mash-up does. We'll add another real-time data source that is very important to both travelers and bus operators: weather.

Iowa State University's Mesonet program provides free, polished weather data for applications. We use this data to create a real-time weather map for our bus location map. We can use the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Mapping Service (WMS) standard to request a single image over our area of interest. A WMS is an OGC standard to serve georeferenced map images through the web, which are generated by a map server through an HTTP request.

The Mesonet system provides an excellent web mapping service that returns a subsetted image from a global precipitation mosaic based on a properly formatted WMS request. An example of...