ACIS Web Services: Efficient Access to Climate Data Products in Support of Climate Services

The Applied Climate Information System (ACIS), an Internet-based system designed developed by the Regional Climate Centers (RCC), has evolved since its inception in the late 1990s. ACIS links historical and real-time in-situ climate data to standardized software that meets specific user requests for climate information. Current users are perhaps most familiar with the ACIS web-interfaces, that provide access to the general public via websites such as NOAA Online Weather Data (NOWData) . Users can now take advantage of ACIS using web services (essentially computer-to-computer interaction over a network). This allows users to directly link ACIS products to their own websites and decision tools, providing a venue by which ACIS can serve as a core resource for developing climate services at national regional and local levels.

The new version of ACIS also offers users access to an expanded set of station-based data, as well as several gridded data sets, representing both daily and monthly observed data and climate model projections. Live examples showing how ACIS web services can be used for user-specific data queries (e.g. occurrences of ≥2 inches of rainfall), temporal summarization (e.g. the longest run of days >95° in each year), and spatial aggregation (e.g. average rainfall from all stations within a specified river basin) will be used. Through these examples both the utility and computational efficiency of ACIS will be demonstrated.