GIS & Weather Syllogism
I was scrolling through Twitter late the other night and saw the following tweet:
I was sad to see the news. It took me back to the very first thing I learned and can remember from my Intro to GIS class before I ever imagined a career in GIS, The First Law of Geography (Tobler’s Law):
Simple, yet profound.
As a junior in the meteorology program at the University of Oklahoma back in 2005, I had to pick an upper level elective. I had no idea what GIS was (until I was exposed to Tobler’s Law on the first day of class), but I couldn’t understand why all of my classmates weren’t taking the Intro to GIS elective. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t required to get a degree in meteorology. If nothing else, if you looked at any map on a given day back then, it was likely a weather map on TV. Remember, this was 2005 before interactive maps were prevalent in our every day lives. Most people didn’t know what GPS was, nobody knew what a smart phone was (because it didn’t really exist), and those who would be early adopters of smart phones only had PDAs — remember Palm Pilot’s anyone?
I think the reason I was so excited about the GIS class was because weather is inherently geospatial. I needed GIS and geography to maximize my understanding of the weather and apply it. I don’t think 2005 me really “got it”, but it eventually led me to the following syllogism:
If everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things AND weather is the state of the atmosphere at a place and time (hence my Medium handle of @ spatiotemporal) AND weather is everywhere all the time, THEN weather is very related to everything all the time BECAUSE it is very near to everything.
When it comes down to it, I sell weather data, so maybe I’m biased. I like to think of it as helping people solve weather related problems to do things more efficiently and keep people safe than hawking weather APIs for use in Esri and other mapping platforms. Either way, I think this syllogism has widespread application. There are people that don’t yet realize how weather impacts them or there business, there are people and companies that do realize this and are working to leverage weather data in relation to the geography of their business, and there are some things that probably aren’t related enough or have enough financial impact driven by weather to worry about.
Now that we can assume that all things are related to weather, here’s to figuring out how and how we can use that information to make our lives and business better. And, here’s to Waldo Tobler and the profound influence his simple law had on me as a student and eventually my career. Without having had that Intro to GIS class on my résumé, I wouldn’t have got the job I have right out of school.
