McIDAS was inspired by the need to have better means of analyzing the torrent of data from the geosynchronous weather satellites and to measure cloud drift winds. The software implementation of the McIDAS control program allows use of McIDAS in field experiments wherever and whenever some means of communication link to a McIDAS host site is feasible. For example, McIDAS was used in charting the flight paths of the research aircraft based in Bahrain to sample the smoke from the oil-well fires in Kuwait. McIDAS is currently used by the National Meteorological Center for routine weather operations and is at the heart of the weather related activities for the space shuttle operations at the Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center. A key reason for the utilization of McIDAS by the meteorological community has been its software capability and flexibility to fit changing environments and user needs while providing a wide range of users with tools to display, overlay, animate and analyze meteorological data.
Planetary data span a large range in terms of data quantity, type, and global coverage.
The strength of McIDAS is in its ability to interact with satellite data for geophysical applications such as multispectral imagery, surface network data, and atmospheric soundings. These enhancements allow use of different radii for solid surfaces and various levels in the atmosphere and are important in dealing with objects such as Venus or Titan. Although McIDAS-eXplorer is general enough to be utilized for most types of data, its strength lies in its ability to manipulate and analyze multispectral images or data that can be visualized as a two dimensional image. Atmospheric vertical profiles, spectra, and Magellan altimeter profiles are examples of different data that can be analyzed within the McIDAS environment. Implementation McIDAS differs from most other image display and analysis environments in that it is a multiprocessing, multiframe intelligent display environment.