GALEON and Other Outreach Activities Status Update

April 2008

GALEON 2 Action Plan

As of March 2007

Action Plan Outline

  1. Agree on high-level dataset categories
  2. Establish extensions to CF conventions for each dataset category
  3. Determine relationships to:
    • Unidata CDM Scientific Data Types
    • CSML Scientific Feature Types
    • Obs. & Meas. Sampling Features
  4. Map CF-netCDF categories to ISO 19123
  5. Establish metadata forms: CSML, ncML-G
  6. Experiment with CF-netCDF encoded coverages as payload for WCS, WFS, SOS

Divide (Labor) and Conquer


  • Coordinate individual efforts toward a whole greater than the sum of the parts
  • Each group focuses on areas of expertise
  • Work on tasks group has funding for
  • Stay aware of other groups’ efforts
  • Coordinate efforts wherever possible
  • Results of lessons learned from implementation and experimentation feeds into standard definition process

British Atmospheric Data Center: Scientific Feature Types / CSML

  • conceptual level mapping of CSML Scientific Feature Types to O&M and ISO 19123 coverages
  • broadening community engagement with CSML
  • CSML (GML) representation of metadata (and data in some cases) for CS community datasets
  • implementation (python) of and experimentation with minimal WCS needed to serve CS community datasets
  • [Note:]   Python client (to both WCS 1.0 and 1.1)  has been agreed to be adopted into OWSLib]
  • examination of alternative protocols (e.g., WFS) for serving CSML datasets
  • liaison with GML, WFS, and CS communities

U of Florence CNR/IMAA: Common Data Model, ncML-G, CS-W

George Mason University: NASA data / HDF-EOS / CS-W

Unidata: CDM Scientific Data Types / CF-netCDF

SURA/DataFed: SWE / station obs / irregular grids

British Met Office

NEXTGEN Network-Enabled Weather (NNEW) Project

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) concept for weather hinges on the ability to develop a common weather "picture," and to integrate that picture into NextGen decision-making processes. An effort is needed to fuse tens of thousands of global weather observations and sensor reports from ground-, airborne-, and space-based sources into a single national (eventually global) weather information system, constantly updated as needed. The effort focuses on four functional areas, dissemination, integration, forecasting, and observation, to realize the goals of the NextGen Integrated Plan.

Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee Meetings (week of March 24)

We made joint presentations with the NNEW Project during the Earth Observations / Natural Resources Environment, Coverages Working Group Sessions.  Focused on aviation related use cases which emphasize characteristics of data systems that are special to atmospheric and related sciences, e.g.,

•
  • Real-time access
  • Elevation/altitude dimension is important
  • Elevation dimension often given in terms of pressure
  • Range interpolation depends on physics as well as geometry
  • Automated processing components, e.g.,
    • Gridding/assimilation
    • Forecast models
    • Transformations between pressure and height

Note also that the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of protocols seems to be gaining considerable practical, implementation and experimentation momentum.  We are a sponsor of the Oceans Interoperability Experiment which is heavily oriented toware SWE protocols and technologies, but it may be worth considering a more direct and active role. 

CoAHP Workshop Proposal to NSF

PI - Olga Wilhelmi, NCAR

Co-PIs: Richard Hooper, CUAHSI, Peter Thornton, NCAR, Ben Domenico, Unidata 

Atmospheric Information in Hydrologic and Ecological Applications: Defining users needs 


 Proposal Objective: This proposal is for conducting a workshop directed at user-defined spatial integration of atmospheric, hydrologic and ecological information. The workshop will: 1) bring together representatives from atmospheric, hydrologic, ecological, GIS, and computer science/cyberinfrastructure communities to learn about users’ knowledge and current and potential uses of atmospheric observational data as well as weather and climate model outputs in hydrological and ecological applications; 2) discuss existing barriers to data and metadata interoperability among the scientific  domain communities; 3) determine users needs and preferences in weather and climate data and model outputs with the focus on specific variables, spatial and temporal scales, and resolution, geographical representation, and mechanisms for data access and discovery; 5) outline research and development strategies for seamless integration of atmospheric data and models with hydrological and ecological data; and 6) discuss opportunities for developing extensible web services for data discovery, access, and transformation. The ultimate goal of the workshop is to have a dialog between atmospheric data providers, technology experts, and the representatives of research communities, so that atmospheric modeling and data archiving communities can better serve the users in environmental geosciences and ecology. The workshop program will include expert presentations, interdisciplinary group discussions, and a writing session. The workshop will produce specific recommendations to the NSF regarding spatial integration of atmospheric models into hydrologic and ecological applications.