Geofoolery

Parts of northern and central Illinois were raked by a severe weather outbreak that produced a number of tornadoes during the evening of Saturday, June 5. My county, Kankakee County, didn't entirely escape the severe weather, but we were fortunate in that there were only minor injuries and that the damage that occurred here wasn't as extensive in other areas. Because of the widespread nature of the event, my department put together a simple interactive map of local storm reports received by the National Weather Service's Chicago and Central Illinois offices. The map is embedded below, but because Posterous seems to have some limitations on what can be done with html in posts, it's best experienced by clicking on the link.

Despite my increasing level of experience with OpenLayers, I hadn't used OpenStreetMap as an OpenLayers base layer up to this point. This was a good chance to try that. The Kankakee County data is our own being served up by GeoServer. We grabbed a shapefile of the local storm reports from the Iowa Envrionmental Mesonet LSR app and loaded it into PostGIS. By the way, as a geospatial and weather nerd, the Iowa Environmental Mesonet in general has become one of my favorite destinations for weather information and data. With a number of downloadable datasets in common GIS formats, some nice Google Maps mashups, and some nice OGC web services, there's a lot there to keep geospatial types happy. Check it out sometime when you have a minute.