Ben,
WCS is suitable for spatial and/or temporal data that contains many data
points. If the observation data includes only one station but has many
time points and/or elevation points, then WCS is still appropriate. Of
course there is not a definition as to how many points qualifies for
"many". I downloaded a netCDF formated file named metarSubset.nc and found
that there is one data point each in the latitude, longitude, and altitude
variables. The time variable is a table but I couldn't view it using
HDFView. I guess that for such data, WCS may not be the best
service. However, if netCDF is commonly used in the community for this
time of point data, I would say that WCS can still be used.
You mentioned special netCDF. If there a document on this special format?
Regards.
Wenli
At 06:11 PM 7/23/2007, Ben Domenico wrote:
Hello,
One of the issues confronting GALEON is the appropriate mechanism for
serving point data of the sort that is collected by weather reporting
stations. It could also be ocean buoys or river gaging stations or air
quality monitoring stations, but at Unidata we work with a lot of
real-time weather data so that's easiest to experiment with. As part of
the THREDDS Data Server NetCDF subset service, there is now an option to
use a browser interface to request a subset of the real-time weather
station observations on our motherlode server:
<http://motherlode.ucar.edu:8080/thredds/ncss/metars/dataset.html>http://motherlode.ucar.edu:8080/thredds/ncss/metars/dataset.html
In addtion to several options for specifying parameters, spatial bounds,
and a time subset, one can also request different output formats:
-- "raw" is the form in which the METAR observations are transmitted
-- "xml" is a dialect of xml that's reasonably easy to decipher
-- "csv" is comma separated values
-- "netCDF" is a special netCDF encoding for this type of data
From the GALEON point of view, an interesting question is whether it
makes sense to try to serve this form of netCDF data via the WCS
interface. Or is it more appropriate to use the WFS or SOS interface for
these data collections?
It would also be interesting to know whether any of the GALEON clients
would be able to work with the netCDF-encoded data delivered by such a
server via any of the interfaces.
Your thoughts on these issues would be appreciated as well as reports on
any experiences you have in attempting to work with the resulting netCDFs.
-- Ben
