A Geographical Information System (GIS) is a system for collecting, storing, retrieving, transforming and displaying spatial data. Because of the apparent spatial-temporal component of meteorological and climate data, GIScience has a large development potential within KNMI. Therefore various projects were started to introduce GIS-technology at KNMI for both scientific and operational applications.

The demand for gridded (interpolated) data products is increasing. Numerical weather models are working at higher spatial resolutions and may be initiated by gridded data from observations. Hydrological models are also improving and need continuous high resolution climatological input data. Risk and disaster managers need to combine meteorological information with urban, industrial and other geo-spatial information to create for example evacuation plans for an urban area near a burning chemical plant. These developments in data use and exchange are supported by the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) directive that aims at optimizing the way in which spatial data is held by public authorities by improving the harmonization of data and the interoperability of spatial services.

To fulfill the internal and external demand for interpolated data, KNMI is doing research to improve the climatological and meteorological interpolation facility. Interpolation deals with the creation of optimal maps by statistically interpolating discretely sampled measurements. Our research aims at improving the interpolation process by using novel interpolation techniques and by taking into account ancillary data like land-sea gradients, altitude, rain radar and yearly trends of environmental factors.

To provide the climatic and meterological datasets to (geoscience) communities KNMI is doing research on GeoSpatial Data Infrastructures (GSDI). We are developing an INSPIRE compliant infrastructure based on OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) web services: Web Mapping Services (WMS) for online visualization and Web Coverage Services (WCS) for downloading raster data.