The 4-D Weather Data Cube is a critical part of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). Approximately, 70% of air traffic delays are attributable to weather impacting the American economy in excess of $40B annually. Of these delays, approximately two thirds could be prevented with greater access to better weather information. The 4-D Weather Data Cube is one of the leading activities of NextGen to provide better access to critical weather data for automated decision making for air traffic management (ATM). It will provide seamless and timely access to environmental data critical to ATM decision making and aircraft operators.

The Information Technology architecture and the associated data services and standards will be a critical component of the 4-D Weather Data Cube. The IT plumbing is essential to making the virtual nature of the distributed data sources a reality. This paper describes the data standards and services that will be used to build the architecture. We plan to leverage two existing data standards and services: the Joint Metoc Broker Language (JMBL) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) family of standards and services.

Our current understanding is that neither existing data services, JMBL and OGC, fully meet the requirements for the 4-D cube. This paper describes our plans to evaluate both against our requirements, perform a gap analysis and develop a strategy to address our requirements against the needed improvements in both the JMBL and OGC standards.