Showcase EUROGRID – towards a European resource for gridded climate data, products and services

Abstract

Abstract. EUROGRID is the vision of the European network of meteorological services (EUMETNET) about a European service for gridded climate monitoring information and products responding to the needs of users from a variety of domains. The EUMETNET project Showcase EUROGRID (S-EUROGRID) presented in this paper has the main objective to provide a better understanding of the EUROGRID idea and the way forward towards its realization. In addition to the identification of user requirements on gridded climate monitoring data and services S-EUROGRID aims to demonstrate example products and services building on existing shared gridded climate monitoring information available from European meteorological and hydrological services and other initiatives. The latter includes a harmonized visualization of data, the generation of example products/services and the dissemination of raw or processed data to the user community. For these purposes S-EUROGRID needed a simple and low-cost technical solution allowing for the seamless integration and dissemination of maps and data contributed by distributed resources, leading to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-protocols as one promising option. In this concept, data providers can set up their own OGC-compliant services for climate data, which then can be viewed/accessed in a harmonized way, e.g. through the S-EUROGRID portal or by a user's specific client software (e.g. a GIS). Dynamic (i.e. real-time) generation of products is beyond the scope of S-EUROGRID, but the architectural choice of OGC-standards offers easy ways for client-side data processing, e.g., using the end user's GIS capacity. In addition, S-EUROGRID hosts a selection of pre-processed example products, illustrating the potential of combining gridded climate monitoring information with data and information sources from other thematic domains.