EarthServer - Serving data from ECMWF's archive through OGC coverage services

As partner of the EU funded EarthServer2 project, ECMWF is exploring the provision of an online data exploration and analysis system based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. Using these standards has the potential to open up services to a wider audience in users domains outside meteorology and climatology.

The EarthServer platform is based on the Rasdaman array database which provides OGC-compatible interfaces which allow direct subsetting on the server through the Web Coverage Service (WCS) standard. More flexible, powerful and bandwidth-saving data access is provided by the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) standard, capable of complex queries, e.g. enabling calculations over fields and data from different services.

Under this project, ECMWF will service Climate datasets in excess of one Peta Byte which bring their own challenges. Guaranteeing a good quality of service is one of them. Another is the support for formats, such as GRIB and netCDF, which are common for the Meteorological and Climate user groups. The set-up will connect to the Meteorological Archive and Retrieval System (MARS) at ECMWF to be able to serve such a large amount of data.

The presentation will give an overview of the project plans, presenting the challenges and first results of serving meteorological data.