Using Geospatial Web Services to Transform Weather, Water, and Climate Information Communication

Over the last decade, the National Weather Service (NWS) partners have requested NWS products and services be provided in Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard web service formats so the NWS data could be leveraged by the systems NWS partners use to communicate with their stakeholders. Over the last four years NWS developed and implemented an operational environment for hosting these geospatial map services to serve as the back-end for maps generated by the NWS when communicating with our stakeholders. This operational geospatial web service platform includes three applications serving geospatial web services for ingest by other applications (ArcGIS ArcServer, Geoserver and nowCOAST web services) and one operational web mapping application (nowCOAST viewer). The data available through the IDP GIS platform includes, but is not limited to, NWS watches/warnings/advisories, Air Quality gridded forecasts, select NDFD elements, NWS RIDGE radar, Climate Prediction Center outlooks, and National Hurricane Center forecasts and outlooks.

Many NWS products and services are not yet available in a standard OGC web map service format. In order to migrate additional Integrated Decision Support Services (IDSS) data to OGC formats, the NWS recently chartered a cross-organizational team to develop and implement these services and front end applications to communicate these data to NWS IDSS stakeholders. The goal of this development to operations team is to consolidate front end applications, leverage the Integrated Dissemination Program GIS back-end architecture, and create a consistent NWS experience for communication of geospatial information. This consistent provision and communication of IDSS information across the NWS will help transform weather, water and climate information communication to support a Weather Ready Nation. This talk will discuss lessons learned in operationalizing weather, water, and climate web mapping services and highlight current and future information communication projects building on this service based operational foundation.