Experiences with a Prototype WCS 2.0 with the Proposed Met-Ocean Extension

Experiences with a prototype WCS 2.0

Rachel Prudden, Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom

The prototype Met-Ocean extension to the OGC WCS 2.0 core has enabled multi-dimnsional requests for data and therefore reducing the volume of data returned to a minimum. This combination provides opportunities for greater flexibility in using the service. Firstly, users can now access all the data they need – and nothing extra – in a single request. Beyond reducing bandwidth requirements, this should result in greater clarity, allowing users to extract more useful information.

The reduction in bandwidth requirements may itself enable greater flexibility. Queries which span several special and temporal dimensions would previously have needed to receive a response in a binary format such as GRIB or NetCDF, as a text-based format would make the overall file size unreasonably high. Since the response size is smaller, it is now feasible to return the data in text-based formats such as JSON. JSON is human-readable, and can be used and understood without additional tools or specialist software.

Another benefit is the additional support for feature types, such as trajectories, cross sections, and polygons, which can be encoded using the common data model (CDM) as used by NetCDF. This presentation will describe our experiences using WCS 2.0 with the Met-Ocean extensions, and our attempts at realising the opportunities above. We will present several example visualizations of WCS data using open source JavaScript libraries such as OpenLayers 3, Cesium and Highcharts. The talk will also outline the general process needed to create these visualizations.