The W1M3A Meteo-Oceanographic Data Centre

Since the last decades, huge efforts were performed in the marine domain towards standardization of data format and data exchange protocols asserting the increasing role in the society and a strong impact on science, technology and business that information systems have. To this aim, a data centre collecting about 15 years of meteorological and oceanographic observations in the Ligurian Sea has been designed. The information system, developed using open source tools (e.g., mySQL, PHP) contains historical data as well measurements collected in near real-time from the fixed buoy of the W1M3A observatory. Different procedures are applied to near real-time and delayed mode data set in agreement with the WMO/JCOMM recommendations. The overall data centre is also capable to produce different types of downstream services to users and to distribute subset of data on request or in automatic way in different format (e.g., MEDATLAS, BUFR, NetCDF, etc.).