Radar visualization and data exporter tools to support interoperability and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)

In February 2005, 61 countries around the World agreed on a 10 year plan to build open systems for sharing geospatial data and services across different platforms worldwide. This system is known as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The objective of GEOSS focuses on easy access to environmental data and interoperability across different systems allowing participating countries to measure the “pulse” of the planet in an effort to advance society. In support of GEOSS goals, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has developed radar visualization and data exporter tools in an open system environment. The NCDC Interactive Radar Viewer and Data Exporter load Weather Surveillance Radar 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) volume scan (S-band) data, known as Level-II, and derived products, known as Level-III, into an OPEN Geographical Information System (GIS)-compliant environment. The application is launched via Java Web Start and runs on the client machine while accessing these data remotely from the NCDC archive or in near real time from other NOAA servers. The Radar Interactive Viewer provides tools for custom data overlays, animations and basic queries. The export of images and movies is provided in multiple formats that support the “blending” of radar data with other types of data.

The Data Exporter allows for data export in both vector polygon (Shapefile, Well-Known Text) and raster (GeoTIFF, ESRI Grid, VTK, NetCDF, GrADS) formats. The NCDC recently partnered with NOAA's National Severe Storms Lab to decode Sigmet C-band Doppler radar data providing the NCDC Viewer/Data Exporter the functionality to read C-Band. This also supports a bilateral agreement between the United States and Canada for data sharing and to support interoperability with the US WSR-88D and Environment Canada radar networks. In addition, the NCDC is developing decoders to read a test bed of distributed X- band radars that are funded through the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) project.

By acquiring the capability to read various radar volume scan formats (S-band, C-band and X-band) and exporting these data into common data formats such as Shapefile for GIS, the NCDC Radar Viewer and Data Exporter is compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and a common data model environment that directly supports GEOSS. This paper describes in further detail the NCDC Radar Visualization and Data Exporter Tools, and the NCDC hopes to establish collaboration with scientists participating in GEOSS to leverage these tools for interoperable use with other global radar networks.