Using Iris and OGC Web Processing Services to generate operational products for the UK National Climate Information Centre

The Met Office National Climate Information Centre (NCIC) maintains historical climate records and gridded datasets to provide a long-term homogeneous record of national-scale climate variability in the UK. A key measure of success is not only the observations and statistics, but also how effectively products and services derived from these observations are made available to those who need them, both internally and externally.

By applying modern software engineering practices, open standards and a service-oriented architecture the NCIC are able to deliver "Science as a Service" and provide a rich selection of data, processing services and products via standard interfaces.

The NCIC software uses Iris, a free and open source python package originating from the Met Office that allows users to work with large multi-dimensional datasets. Processing capabilities are exposed using the OGC Web Processing Service standard and data outputs are made available using other OGC standards.