# Presentation: 529562

## Web Services at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

- Steve Ansari, Rich Baldwin, Stephen Del Greco, Neal Lott, Glenn Rutledge
- NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

- AGU Fall Meeting 2007

## Background

- National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) currently archives over 1.5 petabytes of data.
- Sources include in-situ networks, numerical models, radar, satellite and more.
- Manual access through web pages

## Implementing SOA

- Different approaches for different datasets
- In-situ data:
- 	REST, WaterML, OGC GIS Services
- Severe Weather Data Inventory: REST
- Model/Radar/Satellite:
- 		REST via THREDDS Data Server

## In-Situ Data

- Network examples:
- NCDC-ISD, NCDC-COOP, NCDC-15Precip, NCDC-ASOS
- Metadata (station locations) in ArcSDE / Oracle Spatial
- Time-series data stored in Oracle
- Metadata: OGC GIS Web Services (WMS and WFS)
- http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/
- Data: Implementation of CUAHSI Web Services
- Web Services will be available soon!
- http://cdo.ncdc.noaa.gov/  - interactive web pages

## In-Situ Data

- Consortium of Universities for Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences (CUAHSI)
- Partners with state and federal agencies
- Defines WaterML – a specialized schema definition for water resources

## In-Situ Data

- REST Web Services
**Simple** access to archive data in early 2008
- Provides access to data at a station or within a country, state, county, climate division, watershed
- Easily extendable
- Uses common names or FIPS identifiers
- Authentication token
- http.../servlet/network/type/location/variable/startdate/enddate/output
- Output types (waterML, xml, text, csv)

## In-Situ Data

## Severe Weather Data Inventory

- Geospatial database of weather phenomena represented as point, line or polygon
- Current layers: Prelim. Local Storm Reports, NEXRAD Level-III Storm Attributes (TVS, Meso, Hail, Structure)
- REST Web Service Access:
- Search based on location, data range, within area, etc...
- Statistics – count, summarize by hour, day, month
- Output types (csv, xml, kmz, Shapefile, GeoRSS)
- Basis for SWDI interactive web pages / applications
- http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/swdi

## Severe Weather Data Inventory

- Example SWDI REST URLs:
- (Almost a Virtual File System – hopefully intuitive!)
- http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/swdiws

| 1. /kmz/plsr/20071101:20071115 |
| --- |
| 2. /csv/nx3tvs/20070501:20070601?stat=count |
| 3. /xml/nx3tvs/20070501:20070601
		?radius=5.0&center=-96.0,35.0 |
| 4. /shp/nx3hail/20070501:20070601?state=ca |

## Severe Weather Data Inventory

**Notes:**
Easy to make mash-ups using standards such as XML, KMZ, GeoRSS.  Integrate into Google Maps, Virtual Globe software, Flash, etc...

## Severe Weather Data Inventory

**Notes:**
Easy to make mash-ups using standards such as XML, KMZ, GeoRSS.  Integrate into Google Maps, Virtual Globe software, Flash, etc...

## Severe Weather Data Inventory

## Model / Radar / Satellite

- The NOMADS project
- Utilize NetCDF and Common Data Model for interoperability, decoders, etc...
- THREDDS Data Server – access to data via OPeNDAP, NetCDF Server and OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS)
- GrADS Data Server and the Live Access Server
- Current datasets in THREDDS:
- NARR, RUC, GFS, NAM, NDFD, Stage-IV NEXRAD MPE, HIRS, VTPR, SST

## NOMADS Goals

- communities (ocean, weather, and climate)
- to study multiple earth systems using
- collections of distributed data

-   Promote model evaluation and product development

-   Develop institutional partnerships via distributed open technologies

-   Provide distributed access to models and associated data

*NOMADS Goals*

- _The NOAA Operational Model Archive and Distribution System_

## NOMADS Stats

*NOMADS Stats*

- _The NOAA Operational Model Archive and Distribution System_

| Full File Downloads | Subset Downloads |
| --- | --- |
| 17,161,778 downloads | 9,083,422 downloads |
| 46.46 TB | 0.85 TB |
| 2.84 MB / download | 100.5 KB / download |

## Goals

- Ease of use
- Interoperability with existing tools
- Flexible, distributed architecture
- Data stewardship to multiple user communities
- Efficient use of hardware and bandwidth

## Data Usage - A Few Samples

**Engineering design:   Ice loads for towers, cables, wires, etc**
**	****                                      ****Wind loads for buildings, etc**
**	****                                      ****Heating/cooling requirements**
**	****                                      ****Drainage/runoff extremes (pipes, culverts)**
**Aircraft operations:  Crosswinds (runway design), instrument landing systems, etc**
**Space shuttle accident investigation:  Nexrad data**
**Ship routing and oil rig placement**
**Global re-analyses for climate trends assessment, etc**
**HAZMAT operations and studies:  oil spills, toxic release, etc**
**Weather risk management industry (now > $40 billion per year)**
**Insurance investigations and verification**
**Court cases and criminal investigations**
**Aircraft accident investigations**
**Wind energy studies:  Wind farms, US and overseas**
**Commercial innovation and design:  Typical and extreme conditions for a new market**

## Contact Info

- Steve Ansari – steve.ansari@noaa.gov
- NCDC Web Services website
- http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ws