I am a Regional Coordinator in the shipping industry.
I use Mappoint daily in my routine job functions.

I am mainly surprised to see that this very useful program is missing(or maybe I just dont know where it is?) a very useful feature.

Mainly, I can find no way to import data about projected hurricane or major storm paths on my mappoint. Obviously, routing a truck full of chemicals through a hurricanes path isnt something I want to do, so being able to pull up a projected path of a major winter storm in the Colorados, or a hurricane on the coast, and have it fit over my stored routes, locations, and various pushpins would be very helpful in my day to day work.

Is there something like this in existence already, or is it in the works, or does Microsoft think this wouldnt be a feature someone would like?

To get that kind of weather data, probably requires you to subscribe to a subscription service.

The data would be very time dependent - how would you display this in MapPoint?

The accuracy of the data also changes on a daily basis. Just look at Wilma - when it was just about to come ashore on the Yucatan, ALL of the computer models disagreed with each other and the humans produced the firecasts themselves. It was only after it came ashore that the models agreed on the "fast zip across the Caribbean" although the timing predictions varied.

So you are going to need to update your routes at least every 6 hours, and there would be a huge errors in the predictions. I think you are better of subscribing to a weather bulletin service (or look at Wunderground.com for a good virtually-free service) and allowing humans to determine if forecasts should be interpreted as "avoid Florida", "take snow chains just in case", etc



Richard

Something like the Garmin 396 would be SWEET! Satellite data is superimposed on the map. Just dreaming though.