Re: weather station observation data in netCDF

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Ben,
WCS is suitable for spatial and/or temporal data that contains many data points. If the observation data includes only one station but has many time points and/or elevation points, then WCS is still appropriate. Of course there is not a definition as to how many points qualifies for "many". I downloaded a netCDF formated file named metarSubset.nc and found that there is one data point each in the latitude, longitude, and altitude variables. The time variable is a table but I couldn't view it using HDFView. I guess that for such data, WCS may not be the best service. However, if netCDF is commonly used in the community for this time of point data, I would say that WCS can still be used. 

You mentioned special netCDF.  If there a document on this special format?

Regards.

Wenli

At 06:11 PM 7/23/2007, Ben Domenico wrote:

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>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
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