A GIS precipitation method for analysis of storm kinematics

This paper describes a program developed within Arc-Info GIS as a set of Arc-macros that can be used to identify storm characteristics from a set of rainfall gages through visualization. Three different interpolation techniques, spline, inverse distance weighted and kriging are used to visualize the spatial distribution of rainfall. An automated process using Mpeg technology that displays the storms in a movie sequence was developed to analyze the storm characteristics, i.e. speed and direction. The functionality of this method is illustrated through a case study on Hamilton–Wentworth Region in Ontario, Canada.