Making OGC standards work – interoperability testing between meteorological systems

The Meteorology and Oceanography Domain Working Group (Met Ocean DWG) is a community orientated working group of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The group does not directly revise OGC standards, but rather enables collaboration and communication between groups with meteorological and oceanographic interests. The Met Ocean DWG maintains a list of topics of interest to the meteorological and oceanographic communities for discussion, prioritises activities, defining feedback to the OGC Standards Working Groups (SWG), and performing interoperability experiments.

One of the activities of the MetOcean DWG is the definition of Best Practices documents for common OGC standards, such as WMS and WCS. This is necessary since meteorological data has additional complexities in time, elevation and multi models runs including ensembles. To guarantee interoperability in practice it is important to test each other systems and ensure standards are implemented correctly, but also make recommendations to the DWG on the establishment of Best Practices guides.

The European Working Group on Operational meteorological Workstations (EGOWS) was founded in 1990 as an informal forum for people working in the development field of operational meteorological workstations. The annual EGOWS meeting offers an excellent platform for exchanging information and furthering co-operation among the experts from NMS's, ECMWF and other institutes in the work with OGC standards.

The presentation will give an update of the testing, which was being done during the June 2013 EGOWS meeting in Oslo and what has happen since. The presenter will also give an overview of the online resources to follow the tests and how interested parties can contribute to these interoperability tests.