NOAA’s Global Earth Observation - Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) in Action: Integration of Gridded Datasets

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is making substantial progress in enhancing the ability of users to discover, access, and use the vast amount of environmental information that it collects, maintains, and stores. It has defined a Global Earth Observation - Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) initiative to promote and enable the interoperability of its data management services and to ensure that they are compatible and aligned with interagency and international efforts that are underway (e.g. the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and the Integrated Ocean Observing System). As an example of GEO-IDE in action, NOAA is developing a prototype gridded dataset integration capability. The initial focus will be to develop a Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) catalog of NOAA’s gridded datasets (e.g. model outputs, satellite products, HF radar observations, etc.) that are currently available in netCDF-CF format and enable all services that are readily available including: Data Access Protocol, Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Map Service and Web Coverage Service. A parallel activity will be to harvest, repair, and extend metadata for the datasets to improve the ability for users to discover and then make use of the datasets. Once the above steps have been completed the focus will be to work with other data providers to expand the holdings that are accessible via this mechanism. This effort attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of focusing on a single structural data type (e.g. gridded data) as an approach to integration. This poster will provide an overview of this effort, the technologies and standards being utilized, and will highlight the potential benefits to both NOAA and its scientific user community.