Abstract:
Department of Meteorology, Sri Lanka provides services pertaining to meteorological data to government
agencies, private sector, researchers and the general public in keeping with national interest and
international standards. The department is maintaining 20 major meteorological stations in addition to
many minor stations scattered throughout the Island. There are different meteorological parameters
which are measured in different meteorological stations in different frequencies. Duration of the data
availability of different meteorological parameters differ from station to station. If a researcher or a policy
maker needs to carry out a study which requires meteorological data, descriptive details about the
locational information of the meteorological stations and their data availability is a mandatory
requirement for a site selection and feasibility trials. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to
develop an interactive Web-GIS application to locate meteorological stations in Sri Lanka along with its’
complete metadata such as location of the station, station name, available meteorological data and period
of data availability. In this paper we proposed a Web-GIS application to locate all meteorological stations
in Sri Lanka along with complete metadata of relevant station. Meteorological data can be accessed from
the existing database and GPS locations of meteorological stations will be stored in a database along with
other collected attributes. Finally, application can use LAMP stack with Google Maps API to present
meteorological map on a web browser interactively. Researcher can access this Web-GIS application,
search meteorological stations according to user's requirements and view metadata related to the station
using a single click. This system will be a valuable tool for policy makers and researchers to find out
meteorological data availability for their studies.
