Major cities and locations of the generators owned and operated by Georgia Power, the local electricity utility, are shown by name. Each power plant location is also marked with a pin. The height and color of the pin indicate an estimated load. Correlation of a weather forecast with load prediction. The load is computed interactively as a function of temperature and time of day from a simple model.
Heat index is used as a more accurate measure of demand than simply temperature.
The weather model results are interpolated at each time step to the location of each of the power plants. Implementation Figures 1 through 5 were generated by the visualization component of an integrated operational mesoscale numerical weather prediction system. DX is a portable, general-purpose software package for visualization and analysis. A generic toolkit was used to avoid having to implement a graphics and computational infrastructure. Unlike traditional meteorological graphics, DX is parallelized for multiprocessor workstations and can utilize three-dimensional graphics accelerators.