Abstract
Abstract. As part of a large European coastal operational oceanography project (ECOOP), we have developed a web portal for the display and comparison of model and in situ marine data. The distributed model and in situ datasets are accessed via an Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) respectively. These services were developed independently and readily integrated for the purposes of the ECOOP project, illustrating the ease of interoperability resulting from adherence to international standards. The key feature of the portal is the ability to display co-plotted timeseries of the in situ and model data and the quantification of misfits between the two. By using standards-based web technology we allow the user to quickly and easily explore over twenty model data feeds and compare these with dozens of in situ data feeds without being concerned with the low level details of differing file formats or the physical location of the data. Scientific and operational benefits to this work include model validation, quality control of observations, data assimilation and decision support in near real time. In these areas it is essential to be able to bring different data streams together from often disparate locations.
Highlights
Marine scientists use highly diverse sources of data, including in situ measurements, remotely-sensed information and the results of numerical simulations
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has been instrumental in developing and promoting standards for representing and exchanging geospatial data, and many of its standards are mandated by INSPIRE, notably the Web Map Service (WMS, http://www. opengeospatial.org/standards/wms) for map imagery and the Web Feature Service (WFS, http://www.opengeospatial.org/ standards/wfs) for geospatial data
These standards have evolved from the domain of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which have historically been concerned mainly with two-dimensional land-based data (Rahim et al, 1999; Guney et al, 2003)
Summary
Marine scientists use highly diverse sources of data, including in situ measurements, remotely-sensed information and the results of numerical simulations. The Godiva project (Blower et al, 2009b) provides the starting point for the work presented here It provides an efficient means of exploring 4-D environmental model data by generating 2-D maps or 3-D map-movies from data in CF-NetCDF files for remote viewing on an interactive interface based upon OpenLayers, an open-source browser-based map visualization library. The project uses the ncWMS software (http://ncwms.sf.net/) which generates 2-D maps fast enough for use in real-time interactive data browsing of large datasets This software has been widely adopted by research institutes, government agencies and private industry for presenting operational marine forecasts (e.g. at the UK Met Office) and satellite imagery (e.g. NEODAAS, Plymouth Marine Laboratory).
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