Company Background:
Space-Time Toolkit and Hurricane Opal

The Space-Time Toolkit was a product co-developed by the company's founder, Ron Phillips, while working as a Senior Research Associate at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center. The first use of the Space-Time Toolkit involved visually fusing data from multiple satellites and ground-based products in a tool that, in real-time, geolocated and remapped the data from the North American landfall of hurricane Opal. The combined data could then be interactively animated and manipulated in 3D to see the visual correlations in the radar and satellite data for this destructive storm system. The tool used the following data sets in their "original" format, that is, with no preprocessing to put the data into a common spatial or temporal grid:

• GOES satellite data in a Mercator map projection with 15 minute temporal resolution
• OTD (Optical Transient Detector, i.e., a lightning detector) satellite's visible-light images in CCD (charge-coupled device) "sensor-space" with 1 minute temporal resolution
• OTD satellite's lightning detection events in CCD sensor-space with roughly 10 msec temporal resolution
• CONUS (continental US) radar precipitation in an equirectangular map projection with 15 minute temporal resolution
• CONUS ground strike lightning events with 1 second temporal resolution.

This Space-Time Toolkit technology demonstration was heavily used by the OTD Lightning Team to illustrate the numerous meteorological, military, commercial, and life-saving advantages inherent in an orbital lightning-detection system.