The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) membership has approved the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using GML Coverage Application Schema, an extension to the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard.
The OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard has emerged as a widely used and well supported data model and encoding for domains such as atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, meteorology, and hydrology. It supports multi-dimensional data representing space and time-varying phenomena.
NetCDF was developed and is maintained and actively supported by the Unidata Program Center of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and UCAR is a member organization of the OGC. The OGC NetCDF Core Encoding Standard has been formally recognized by US Government NASA and NOAA standards bodies. CF-netCDF is a specification that ensures that data stored in netCDF format files conform to the Climate and Forecast conventions for metadata.
The new extension to the OGC CF-netCDF standards suite specifies how CF-netCDF datasets are encoded to conform to the "OGC Implementation Schema for Coverages." Coverages are data such as the output of weather and climate forecast models, weather station and ocean buoy observations, balloon soundings, ground-base radar, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, or LIDAR point clouds. This extension specifies how these complex multi-dimensional CF-netCDF data are encoded as OGC coverages for use in geographic information systems (GIS) or other geospatial systems.
The documents for the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using GML Coverage Application Schema (sometimes referred to as netCDF-GMLCOV) are available at www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.
