Showcase EUROGRID – towards a European resource for gridded climate data, products and services

摘要

EUROGRID is the vision of the European network of meteorological services(EUMETNET) about a European service for gridded climate monitoringinformation and products responding to the needs of users from a variety ofdomains. The EUMETNET project Showcase EUROGRID (S-EUROGRID) presented inthis paper has the main objective to provide a better understanding of theEUROGRID idea and the way forward towards its realization. In addition tothe identification of user requirements on gridded climate monitoring dataand services S-EUROGRID aims to demonstrate example products and servicesbuilding on existing shared gridded climate monitoring information availablefrom European meteorological and hydrological services and otherinitiatives. The latter includes a harmonized visualization of data, thegeneration of example products/services and the dissemination of raw orprocessed data to the user community. For these purposes S-EUROGRID needed asimple and low-cost technical solution allowing for the seamless integrationand dissemination of maps and data contributed by distributed resources,leading to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-protocols as one promisingoption. In this concept, data providers can set up their own OGC-compliantservices for climate data, which then can be viewed/accessed in a harmonizedway, e.g. through the S-EUROGRID portal or by a user's specific clientsoftware (e.g. a GIS). Dynamic (i.e. real-time) generation of products isbeyond the scope of S-EUROGRID, but the architectural choice ofOGC-standards offers easy ways for client-side data processing, e.g., usingthe end user's GIS capacity. In addition, S-EUROGRID hosts a selection ofpre-processed example products, illustrating the potential of combininggridded climate monitoring information with data and information sourcesfrom other thematic domains.