Imagine sitting at your home computer and being able to collect every bit of information the National Weather Service and other government agencies have on Hurricane Iniki.

Or, how about being able to compare Iniki's path in 1992 with that of a new storm approaching Hawai'i?

Want to use your home computer to pull up a 3-D graphic of a hailstorm pummeling the Oklahoma City airport?

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration is hosting a workshop at the East-West Center in Manoa where NOAA scientists and their colleagues from universities and other federal agencies around the country are talking about ways to make the myriad data collected by NOAA agencies more accessible and useable for everyone, from research scientists to armchair meteorologists.

NOAA's Integrated Data and Environmental Applications — or IDEA for short — set up shop at the East-West Center in 2005 and this week is hosting the first workshop where scientists can get together to talk about different ways weather data is being collected and used.

Eileen Shea, IDEA Center director, said the Honolulu center is the first of its kind in the country.

"The Pacific is a great little microcosm of the world," Shea said. "People throughout the Pacific are really close to their environment and work well together." The center's focus is on "integrations of resources," she said.

For instance, data collected by the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service can be blended using evolving software programs and used by the Central Pacific Hurricane Center to help generate its annual hurricane season forecast.

"One of our projects is to create a 'storm event anatomy,' where we pick the top 10 storms and create a Web portal for people to access all kinds of data about each of those storms. It's really kind of a storm almanac."

Other software on display at the workshop allows users to better define swirling radar images of Hurricane Katrina as it roared through New Orleans or to generate three-dimensional images of an intense, month-long rainstorm that pelted O'ahu and Kaua'i in April 2006.

The increased, computer accessible data is meant to be a supplement to information provided by the National Weather Service, Shea said.

"We're not in the business of putting out weather services," Shea said.

Reach David Waite at dwaite@honoluluadvertiser.com.