RE: weather station observation data in netCDF

• To: "Ben Domenico" <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Unidata GALEON" <galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: RE: weather station observation data in netCDF
• From: "Ron Lake" <rlake@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:15:45 -0700

Hi,

We are currently handling this type of data using WFS with GML
observations or more explicitly GML application schemas (mainly for the
observation result) for the observation result. We are doing this with
weather data, radiation data, traffic data etc.

Cheers

Ron

From: owner-galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Ben Domenico
Sent: Mon 7/23/2007 3:11 PM
To: Unidata GALEON
Subject: weather station observation data in netCDF


Hello,

One of the issues confronting GALEON is the appropriate mechanism for
serving point data of the sort that is collected by weather reporting
stations.  It could also be ocean buoys or river gaging stations or air
quality monitoring stations, but at Unidata we work with a lot of
real-time weather data so that's easiest to experiment with.   As part
of the THREDDS Data Server NetCDF subset service, there is now an option
to use a browser interface to request a subset of the real-time weather
station observations on our motherlode server:

http://motherlode.ucar.edu:8080/thredds/ncss/metars/dataset.html

In addtion to several options for specifying parameters, spatial bounds,
and a time subset, one can also request different output formats:

-- "raw" is the form in which the METAR observations are transmitted
-- "xml" is a dialect of xml that's reasonably easy to decipher
-- "csv" is comma separated values
-- "netCDF" is a special netCDF encoding for this type of data

_From the GALEON point of view, an interesting question is whether it
makes sense to try to serve this form of netCDF data via the WCS
interface.  Or is it more appropriate to use the WFS or SOS interface

for these data collections?

It would also be interesting to know whether any of the GALEON clients
would be able to work with the netCDF-encoded data delivered by such a
server via any of the interfaces.

Your thoughts on these issues would be appreciated as well as reports on
any experiences you have in attempting to work with the resulting
netCDFs.

-- Ben

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: weather station observation data in netCDF
    • From: Roy Mendelssohn

• References:
  • weather station observation data in netCDF
    • From: Ben Domenico