QGIS Time Manager Example: Visualizing Storm Data

September 6, 2011 Anita Graser

Today, I’ve compiled a short video showcasing one of the possible uses of Time Manager plugin: Storm tracking. (Storm data can be downloaded from www.nhc.noaa.gov.)

Point size shows storm class, labels read maximum speed in mph.

If you are using Time Manager for your work, I’d love to hear about it.

by underdark at 8:13 PM under qgis , spatio-temporal data , time manager , visualization (Comments)

WMS-T Support in Geoserver and Mapserver

June 10, 2011 Anita Graser

“-T”, this small appendix can be found after many popular GIS-related acronym. But of course, it always means something different. Take for example GIS-T (GIS for Transportation), WFS-T (Transactional WFS) and WMS-T (WMS with time support). The world of acronyms is a fun place!

Let’s see what a WMS-T can do for us. From the WMS standard:

Some geographic information may be available at multiple times (for example, an hourly weather map). A WMS
may announce available times in its service metadata, and the GetMap operation includes a parameter for
requesting a particular time. [...] Depending on the context, time
values may appear as a single value, a list of values, or an interval, …

Currently, only Mapserver supports WMS-T but the Geoserver team is working on it.

Mapserver

MapServer 4.4 and above provides support to interpret the TIME parameter and transform the resulting values into appropriate requests.

Time attributes are specified within the metadata section:

METADATA "wms_title" "Earthquakes" "wms_timeextent" "2011-06-01/2011-07-01" "wms_timeitem" "TIME" "wms_timedefault" "2011-06-10 12:10:00" END

Mapserver supports temporal queries for single values, multiple values, single range values or even multiple range values:

...&TIME=2011-06-10&... ...&TIME=2011-06-10, 2004-10-13, 2011-06-19&... ...&TIME=2011-06-10/2011-06-13&... ...&TIME=2011-06-10/2011-06-15, 2011-06-20/2011-06-25&...

Geoserver

GeoSolutions has developed support for TIME and ELEVATION dimensions in WMS.
There are plans to backport this feature to the stable 2.1.x series after the 2.1.1 release.

Configuration of time-enabled layers can be done via the normal user interface:

The following video by GeoSolutions demonstrates the use of Geoserver’s WMS-T:

Both server solutions seem to support only one time attribute per layer. An optional second time attribute would be nice to support datasets with start and end time like Time Manager for QGIS does.

by underdark at 4:24 PM under geoserver , gis , mapserver , spatio-temporal data , wms-t (Comments)

Time Manager 0.3 Released

February 28, 2011 Anita Graser

We are pleased to announce the release of Time Manager version 0.3. New features include:

Saving – Time Manager settings are now being saved to the project file.
Image series export – animations can be exported as image series.
Help files – The plugin now comes with a user guide / help file.
Looping animations – When “looping” is enabled, the animation will start over from the beginning instead of stopping when it reaches the end.