© ECMWF October 4, 2016

Web Coverage Service for meteorological dataExperience from the EarthServer-2 project

Julia Wagemannjulia.Wagemann@ecmwf.int

Workshop: Implementation and potential of INSPIRE coverage data and WCS (I)INSPIRE conference 2016, Barcelona30 September 2016

2EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS

Who is familiar with meteorological data?

This might be familiar…

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This might be familiar…

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ce air temperature anomaly 16 relative to the August ge for the period 1981-2010 WF, Copernicus C3S)

Monthly gmean surtemperatuanomaliesto 1981-2

It is getting more complex…

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River discharge forecast hydrograph for 8 April 2008

(Source: GloFAS)

10-day epsgram for 2m air temperature – base date: Tuesday, 27 September(Source: ECMWF)

Meteorological data structures – a challenge

3D 4D 5D

• Large data volumes

• Multi-dimensional

• Lots of metadata

• Heterogeneous (forecast, analysis, etc)

• GRIB data format

• Large data volumes

• Multi-dimensional

• Lots of metadata

• Heterogeneous (forecast, analysis, etc)

• GRIB data format

Complexity &

Meteorological and Archival Retrieval System• World’s largest archive of meteorological

data• > 90 PBs (and continues to grow by 3 PB

per month)

Efficient data retrieval service for experts

MARS

MARS request

Expert user

.GRIB / .netCDF

Raw data / subsets

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Challenge

Data is complex and

large

Challenge

Download service

for expert users

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WCS for Climate Data (EarthServer-2)

WCS is of great valfor data providers

developers and scien

Objective Conclusi

• Provide access to over 1 PB of global climate reanalysis data

• Offer server-based data access and processing

• Make ECMWF data more accessible to users, especially outside the MetOcean domain

WCS as part of the data-processing chain

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Developer

GIS User

Scientist

Useful for:

From a service for expert users to a service for “users”

WC(P)SWC(P)S

MARS

rasdamanrasdaman

MARS request

Expert user

.GRIB / .netCDF

Raw data / subsets

WC(P)Srequest

MARS request?

User

Raw data / subsets / time-series

.netCDF, image formats,further processing

Nature of data requ

Scalability?

In what data structustore/register data/met

Efficiency?

Limit of data volumerequest?

Right representation of meteorological data structures

From a general “data description”…

to a systematic meteorological (data application profile!

But all the PBs will be useless, if…

And this includes…

KEEP IT SIMPLAND HIDE

COMPLEXITY

ATA FORMATSFormats such as GeoJSON, netCDF

ETADATA INFORMATIONExample: lat/lon information for ad-hoc plotting

UMAN vs. MACHINE READABLEExample: ansi date format

Conclusion

WCS HAS GREAT POTENTIAL• to offer an on-demand pull service, supplementa

expert systems in place• to increase data uptake, especially to users of oth

communities

CHALLENGES• Variety of data structures• Keep the user in focus that usage of download

service is ensured• Paradigm change – from data-to-user to user-to-

data

THANK YOU!Questions?

More information

• WCS for Climate Data: http://earthserver.ecmwf.int

• OGC WCS tutorial: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/earthserver-eu/OGC_WCS_tutorial/blob/master/index

• EarthServer-2: http://www.ecmwf.int/en/earthserver-2

Do you want to become a WCS test user?

• Contact us via earthserver@lists.ecmwf.int

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ata Policy Workshop | 28 February –1 March 2017Workshop on Meteorological Operational Systems (MOS) | 1–3 March 2017opendatahack – Discover the potential of weather data | 4–5 March 2017

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