Prototype of the Mexican spatial data infrastructure for climate raster models and satellite imagery (“VISTA-C”)

Abstract

In the face of climatic uncertainty and its impacts on agriculture yields, there is a growing need for public institutions of subtropical countries to access as reliable as possible meteorological models and transmit a representation of their results in an effective way to stakeholders in agriculture. In many of these countries however, broad climatic regions and point-based statistics remain the core of these representations. The use of satellite imagery is largely limited to visual assessment, although it could serve as complementary data to meteorological raster models and the basis for spatially consistent quantitative impact assessments of meteorological events. In view of this situation in Mexico, a project developed by the Institute of Geography at UNAM university, and promoted by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics, consisted in the development of a climate monitoring system, which includes three main features: 1) a modular array storage system containing NOAA and GOES satellite imagery acquired though a receiving station (ERISA), 2) a climate modeling squeme based on successive error corrections of climate raster maps and associated models using the above mentioned imagery, and 3) an online, dynamic geovisualization of the results of the models. We discuss the implemented technologies and illustrate the VISTA-C prototype which has been released.