This page lists the topics that are of interest to the Met DWG community. These are topics that range from only needing discussion to facilitate agreement, those that are best resolved through interoperability experiments, or proposals on how existing standards must be modified to support the Met community.

When topic descriptions get large, the content should be moved to a separate page that is linked to from this page.

Security and Access Control

Gridded data and coverages

How is gridded coverage data best handled with OGC standards? For data access there is more than one alternative, such as using a Web Coverage Service to return NetCDF data and using a Web Feature Service to return GML coverages.

Gridded data as used in the meteorological community and coverages do not always match semantically, where does this cause issues?

Forecast time handling in gridded coverages

How should forecast run times (and other metadata) be handled? A good example of the issue is when retrieving forecast data from a Web Coverage Service. How would a met data consumer retrieve a particular forecast/valid time combination from the WCS? Are forecast run times a dimension in the same way as valid time, or are forecast run times merely metadata?

Example solutions for a 3-D forecast series:

• use (X,Y,Z, valid time, and forecast offset time in minutes) as a 5-dimensional coverage
• use (X,Y,Z, valid time, forecast run time) as a 5-dimensional coverage. This approach has the disadvantage of large amounts of unique forecast run times as compared to the first solution
• use (X,Y,Z, valid time) as a 4-dimensional coverage, where the valid time is assumed to always be from the most recent forecast run that is available. This does not resolve the full set of use cases because it is not possible to retrieve older forecasts once the newer becomes available, but in combination with another solution could be useful
• use (X,Y,Z, valid time) and provide a domain-specific extension for each service that allows the consumer to provide a forecast run time. This is essentially a domain-specific extension/circumvention of WCS/WFS mechanisms

Metadata

Is the met community interested in metadata standards? What requirements should be met?

WMO Metadata Core Profile

WMO in 2008 defined and endorsed a common WMO Metadata Core Profile v1.1 as a strict subset of ISO 19115:2003. Can this be used outside of its original operational community? http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/WDM/Metadata/documents.html

Nextgen Network-Enabled Weather Metadata Guidelines

The NNEW program has developed metadata standards based upon ISO 19115, ISO 19119, and ISO 19139. This covers dataset, organization, and service-related metadata. https://wiki.ucar.edu/download/attachments/23364539/ATC-354.pdf

Registries, Catalogs, and/or Repositories

OGC CS-W and EbXML RegRep

Search

What common standards should be used to allow interoperable searches of Catalogues, Repositories and Registries?

E.g. CSW v2.0.2? ISO 23950 using SRU Profile v1.2 over HTTP?

Can we agree on correct behaviour and results with bounding boxes encompassing a Pole or the Anti-Meridian (Date line)?

Vertical Coordinates

Metadata, search, filtering

Asynchronous and dynamic data delivery

This includes issues of notification of data availability.

Cross-system integration

Working with WCS, GRIB, or OpenDap?

Descriptions of cross sections