Wow,
This thread (pun intended) woke me up this Friday morning. WCS for
OPeDNAP will be a great leap forward for our shop and BUFR- the WMO
standard format for model input ("the BUFR tanks" at NCEP, Upper-Air
collectives, and other data near and dear to NWP, goes a long way toward
the implementation of a long awaited single (virtual) interface to for
anyone doing Model Intercomparison Projects, or grib/NetCDF/BUFR... data
analysis. We just wrote a BUFR decoder in perl to overcome some of our
issues with BUFR (as listed below), so yes- NOMADS cares very much- more
importantly users- last month we had 4M downloads, serving over 3.6Tb
of data and several emails requesting BUFR access. NOAA has a
requirement for BUFR decode/access and display as well.
So, the NCDC NOMADS shop will gladly test or otherwise try to help in
this endeavor. Granted, we don't have the expertise to develop this- we
do have some talent to install and flush out issues associated with
these formats and interfaces thru OpeNDAP. One final note: Grib2 is
on the horizon....COLA is very much aware of this but not a top
priority. Anyone working this for GDS? Just wondering......
Thanks to all for your leadership and vision in all this....Glenn
John Caron wrote:
Tennessee Leeuwenburg wrote:
Hi guys,
We're looking at phase two of the project I'm working on at the
moment. Phase one involved hooking up our weirdo database to OpenDAP,
and it looks that that will be a success. There's one thing that's
not as wonderful as we might hope, and a couple of cool extra things
we'd like to do.
In order to cope with observational data stored in BUFR format, we've
had to write scripts for conversion to NetCDF prior to serving it
with thredds. I don't really like messing about in thredds code if I
can help it, on account of it makes code maintainance that much
harder. So we convert to NetCDF on a product-by-product basis. But it
would be way cool if we could serve BUFR data more generally and
without the conversion step. So my question is : does anyone on this
list care much about BUFR data, and is anyone thinking much about how
it might fit into an OpenDAP context?
What kind of data is stored in BUFR?
We have an "I/O service provider" framework in netcdf-java version
2.2, where you can read non-native files as if they are netcdf files.
We have done GRIB files in this way, among others. It would probably
be very cool to be able to do that for BUFR files. If you're
interested i can tell you more.
The other angle is from the GIS world rather than the data sharing
world. We'd love to publish some of our data sets in such a way that
GIS packages can read them. To the best of my knowledge, no GIS
package reads OpenDAP or even NetCDF. This means we've either got to
do a conversion step from NetCDF into something that the GIS packages
can read, and then serve it out using a different server - like a
shapefile server for instance. So we would have to choose specific
products to make available, provide shapefile derivatives from our
hi-res NetCDF data, and tell people to go look there. It's not the
worst plan I've ever heard, but has anyone here heard about any
efforts to integrate OpenDAP more tightly with GIS software?
The next version of the THREDDS server will have OpenDAP integrated
into it. It will also have an experimental WCS server for gridded
data. The idea is that anything that can be read in through
netcdf-java version 2.2 can be served through opendap. If theres
enough georeferencing, these can also be served through WCS. Again it
would be cool to extend this to a WFS server for features, although it
would be a lot of work.
We are also working with ESRI on their project to read in netcdf
gridded files, and another project with GDAL/Cadcorp experimenting
with netcdf over WCS. Still both in research stage.
--
Glenn K. Rutledge
NOMADS Program Manager
NOAA Meteorologist / Physical Scientist
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center
151 Patton Ave
Asheville, North Carolina 28801
(828) 271-4097
The contents of this message are mine personally
and do not necessarily reflect any position of the
Government or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."
