Development of the Environmental Decision Support System: Towards Web-Based Impact-Driven Decision Support Services

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) vision for a Weather-Ready Nation involves building community resilience in response to the increasing vulnerability to high impact weather events. One of the NOAA's objectives outlined in Weather-Ready Nation Roadmap 2.0 is to provide relevant information and interpretative services to enable decision making when weather, water, or climate has a direct impact on the protection of lives and livelihoods. Our Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS) includes a framework for impact-based decision support services. EDSS integrates several open source packages to create an easily accessible, yet robust, web application for conglomerating, searching, viewing, and downloading weather and climate information for scientists and decision makers. The Geoportal and Geonetwork web applications provide intuitive Geographic Information System (GIS) interfaces for searching and managing metadata ingested from multiple data sets and data sources. The GeoServer and ncWMS web applications serve overlays and information for visual presentations of the data through Web Mapping Services (WMS) by ingesting various scientific and geospatial formats (e.g. ESRI shapefiles, GeoTIFFs, KML, NetCDF, HDF and GRIB files). External web mapping and web feature services can also be ingested through a custom designed layer manager. Users of the EDSS can browse the catalog of available products, enter a simple search string, or constrain searches by temporal and spatial extents. Combined with a custom visualization web application, the EDSS provides a simple, efficient means for users to access and display weather, climate and environmental data, and also trace data sources and analytical methods used in the functional decision aid products.