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Until recently, British Columbia suffered from a dearth of publicly and easily accessible (open) meteorological data. While Environment Canada (EC) maintains approximately 250 active in situ weather stations, the remaining meteorological and climate data -- which represent the majority of observations made in the province -- have been gathered by the provincial government within several disparate, ministry-specific networks. Those observations have traditionally been either inaccessible to non-government employees or only available on a network-by-network basis by contacting network managers and requesting custom data queries. Under a collaborative agreement between several provincial ministries, private industry and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) and with support from EC, the entire province's meteorological archive has been collected into a single database at PCIC and made publicly accessible via web services and open data protocols. In this paper, we describe our web services, built on open-source software, which provide users access to the full catalogue of BC's meteorological observations through a simple user interface. Our geographic web services provide users access to station locations using Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Mapping Service and Web Feature Service protocols. We use OpenDAP to provide users download access to over a century of weather observations through a variety of open formats such as NetCDF, HDF, ASCII, and others. The goals of these web services are twofold. We primarily aim to provide planners, scientists and researchers with timely and comprehensive climate data as conveniently and efficiently as possible. A natural consequence of this is to enable the flexibility to expand the volume and types of data served and to facilitate more sophisticated analysis regarding past and future climate.
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Web services for open meteorologicaldata in British Columbia
James Hiebert and Faron AnslowPacific Climate Impacts Consortium
University of VictoriaVictoria, BC Canada
AGU Fall MeetingIN41C-06
December 6, 2012
Overview
• Who am I and what do I do?• From where do BC’s met data come?• Description of our data portal web app• User experience and responses
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium(PCIC)
• Regional climate services provider• Non-profit hosted at the University of Victoria (BC)• Fill a niche between pure research and applied science
Data
Climate Related Monitoring Program(CRMP)
Review of Acronyms
• PCIC (Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium)• CRMP (Climate Related Monitoring Program)• PCDS (Provincial Climate Data Set)
Status Quo
Frustration
PCIC's Data Delivery Application
Protocols
WMS
WMSGetFeature
Info
WMSFilters
OPeNDAP
WFS
User Experience
What weather stations are close to this:
ROAD?CITY?
RIVER?
Old way??
??????
?? ??
??????
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????
New way (just look)
Ask the users:The Data Portal is...
We need as muchdata as possible
...worth a hellof a lot of money
...essential for conductingan inventory of disparate
observing sites
Future Work: Raster Data
Questions?
