An interoperable spatiotemporal weather radar data dissemination system

This paper investigates an interoperable framework to disseminate Earth Science data to different application domains. The proposed framework can manage different Earth science data products and raster snapshots over time through the use of relevant metadata information. The framework generates images to be accessed by GIS software for various Earth science and web-based applications. The access is enabled through the compliance with OpenGeospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) for interoperability such that any WMS viewer can access the service. The framework can provide GIS users the capability to incorporate geospatial information from other WMS servers. Using the United States NEXt generation weather RADar (NEXRAD) data, we demonstrate how the proposed framework can facilitate the dissemination of Earth Science data to a broad community in a near real-time fashion. The proposed framework can be used to manage and disseminate various types of spatiotemporal Earth science data.