TAO forms the observational cornerstone of NOAA’s El Niño Observing System, supporting NOAA's mission of improving seasonal to interannual climate forecasts. Web services are an important standards-based technology for machine-to-machine data access over the Internet. Web Services have been used commercially for some time and the technology is only now beginning to be used for environmental data.

We are creating a web service interface to the TAO data archive at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. By using the web service, a consumer of TAO data can create their own client to obtain their desired subset of data from the TAO database, on their own schedule through an automated machine-to-machine interface. This will not replace other methods of obtaining TAO data or graphics, but it is an elegant standards based solution that is superior to developing customized ad hoc scripts for quasi-automated data downloads. We will discuss the challenges posed during the design process and discuss the API that is exposed by the TAO web service.