Weather on the Web

Weather on the Web

Richard Carne and Peter Trevelyan

UK Met Office (UKMO)

FitzRoy Road, Exeter

Background:- we all recognise the increasing demand for the provision of weather and climate information and as a result the growing interest of the private sector in providing value added services in the weather and climate market. At the same time NMSs wish to maintain the authoritative voice whilst providing public services and support the stability of the private sector in the market, driving socioeconomic benefit. This, coupled with the internal challenges of increasing data volumes as we improve model resolution, is leading to significant technical challenges when disseminating information.

As a community we should work together to address these challenges to sustain our authoritative voice and ensure that global aggregators, private sector, partners and customers continue to look to National Met Services for weather and climate information.

Building on the WIS as a global data sharing platform by developing web-based services that allow access to ‘domain standardised’ model data from the WMO community, our collective interactions with the private sector in providing data for re-use becomes more successful.

WotW initiative: the key to data sharing is to agree an API, vocabulary and set of common standards that are shared by all participants’. This paper will explain this work and how the API is documented using the OpenAPI specification providing a technology independent description. The design of the API will be based on the OGC’s WFS3.0 and a full set of metadata will be supported and so providing support of future catalogue services and supporting a recognized source of authoritative data. There will be a small demonstration that will be available to interested parties so helping with the adoption of the services. It is hoped that the demonstrator will include industry partners (e.g. GIS providers). The demonstration will also show that there will be a “family” of APIs so reflecting the varying complexity of the supported use cases. Thus, there will be a simple API for point extraction, whereas vertical profiles will need more complexity etc.