The Road to An Operational Open Source Geospatial System for Meteorological Data

As NOAA stood up the Integrated Dissemination Program (IDP) Geographic Information System (GIS) infrastructure, it was recognized a hybrid solution of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) and Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) would provide the most effective environment for satisfying requirements to deliver 7/24 geospatial web services to NOAA stakeholders while minimizing license costs and maximizing capability. NOAA data, in particularly, National Weather Service data is dynamic, multi-dimensional big data distributed using scientific or meteorological data standards (e.g. NetCDF-4 CF, GRIB-2, BUFR, METAR, etc). To ensure the system was operational 7/24, NOAA established a contractual relationship with Boundless to provide maintenance and support GeoServer, the open source solution for IDP GIS.

Meteorological data formats have not been traditionally supported by GIS software. The IDP GIS project and the NWS NextGen Aviation Information Technology project require the ability to ingest or convert data from scientific standards to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards in order to provide interoperable data to stakeholders outside of the scientific community and weather enterprise. As a result, NOAA and Boundless are in the process of expanding GeoServer to include support for NetCDF-4 CF and GRIB data formats.

NWS 7/24 systems must also be secure, scalable, and redundant. Prior to IDP GIS, NOAA's geospatial capability was limited to single instances of services hosted on a single machine. However, in order to meet the needs of a true operational environment, the architecture needed to expand to support performance load balancing, high-availability, and failover and redundancy.. This presentation will discuss the partnership of the government and private sector to evolve technology to support the requirements of a secure system delivering scientific data as geospatial web services 7/24.