Brokering Services for Real-time Weather Data and Climate Prediction Products Data Discovery and Access

Real time weather data presents special challenges to internet services based data discovery and access systems because of the volume and volitility of the datasets. On the other hand, processed products (such as anomalies) generated from climate prediction model runs present another set challenges due to special metadata required for temporal and lineage information. The use of a brokering layer between access and analysis clients and data provider servers has the potential to address some of these issues. Experiments are underway to determine whether the theoretical advantage of such a brokering tier can be realized in practical applications. In particular, THREDDS Data Server (TDS) implementations on the Motherlode server at Unidata and the NCAR GIS Climate Change portal are being used in conjunction with brokering services implemented using the GI-cat and GI-axe broker packages from the ESSI Laboratory of the National Research Council of Italy. A variety of clients were successfully tested, including the EuroGEOSS data discovery system, the GI-go discovery and access system, Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer and a variety of Web Map Service (WMS) clients. This presentation reports on the outcomes of these early experiments. Real time weather data presents special challenges to internet services based data discovery and access systems because of the volume and volitility of the datasets. On the other hand, processed products (such as anomalies) generated from climate prediction model runs present another set challenges due to special metadata required for temporal and lineage information. The use of a brokering layer between access and analysis clients and data provider servers has the potential to address some of these issues. Experiments are underway to determine whether the theoretical advantage of such a brokering tier can be realized in practical applications. In particular, THREDDS Data Server (TDS) implementations on the Motherlode server at Unidata and the NCAR GIS Climate Change portal are being used in conjunction with brokering services implemented using the GI-cat and GI-axe broker packages from the ESSI Laboratory of the National Research Council of Italy. A variety of clients were successfully tested, including the EuroGEOSS data discovery system, the GI-go discovery and access system, Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer and a variety of Web Map Service (WMS) clients. This presentation reports on the outcomes of these early experiments.