As part of the GALEON 2 (Geo-interface for Air, Land, Environment, Ocean NetCDF) interoperability experiment of the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), a Web Coverage Service (WCS) client library has been written in the python language. The WCS client library, developed at the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) is available as part of OGC

Web Service (OWSlib) utility library, a package for working with OGC map, feature, and coverage services. OWSlib provides a common API for accessing service metadata and wrappers for GetCapabilities, GetMap, GetFeature, and GetCoverage requests. A script for exercising rudimentary data access capabilities was created for use with GALEON servers at a number of sites, including the US Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory, ARGOSS of the Netherlands, the USGS at Woods Hole, UCAR Unidata, NCDC NOMADS, the KNMI of the Netherlands, the US NSIDC, the Italian CNR-IMAA, the UK NERC, the US NNEW Project, and

George Mason University. The servers include implementations based on several release levels: WCS 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.1.1. The paper reports on lessons learned regarding the use of python scripts for exercising standards-based protocols, issues encountered relating to

the different release levels of the WCS protocol, as well as problems uncovered and corrected in the python libraries.