NOAAServer: Unified access to distributed NOAA data Ernest Daddio, NOAA/ESDIM Steve Hankin, NOAA/PMEL Donald Denbo, NOAA/PMEL/JISAO Nancy Soreide, NOAA/PMEL Saul Rosenberg, NOAA/ESDIM Joe Sirott, NOAA/PMEL/JISAO Steve Roberts, UCAR/JOSS W. Zhu, NOAA/PMEL/JISAO AMS / IIPS, Jan 10-15, 1999, Dallas, TX

NOAAServer l Objective: Provide centralized, unified access to distributed NOAA data l Participants: All of the NOAA Line Offices n National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service n National Marine Fisheries Service n National Ocean Service n National Weather Service n Oceanic and Atmospheric Research

NOAAServer l Initiated in NOAA’s Environmental Services Data and Information Management (ESDIM) office in 1995 l Integrates 14 distributed data servers l Over 15,000 metadata descriptions l Available from the NOAA Home Page n n

Operational NOAAServer l Locating data: n Enter search criteria n The NOAAServer returns a list of data collections meeting the search criteria n View a description of the data collection n If data is on-line, interact to subset data, obtain plot or listing of data n If sub-setted data is sufficiently small, data can be downloaded to the users disk

Operational NOAAServer* l Representative data: n satellite images n time series of oceanographic and meteorological station measurements n two-dimensional oceanic parameters n text documents n vertical profiles of measurements through the atmosphere and the ocean *

Operational NOAAServer

l Integrates NOAA Data and Information Services on the Web l Centralized search for NOAA wide data holdings: n Search, view, download/order distributed NOAA data n http and conventional, legacy CGI scripts l but different datasets have different navigation and interface characteristics

Where are we headed? l Recent developments include methods for providing a centralized and unified data access l Next Generation NOAAServer n Data is easily located and accessed n User sees a consistent search and navigation interface n So data is viewed consistently across servers n Better service to a wider audience

Next Generation NOAAServer Prototype demonstration l connects 6 geographically distributed data servers in Silver Spring, Boulder, Seattle l CORBA for network connections l unified interactive Java graphics* l data from distributed servers are co- plotted together on the same axis on the users desktop *

Next Generation NOAAServer Gridded COADS Climatology dataset (red) plotted with buoy time series from TAO (green)

Next Generation NOAAServer COADS data (Seattle) and buoy time series from NODC (Silver Spring) & PMEL/TAO (Seattle)

Next Generation NOAAServer Atmospheric profile data (UCAR,Boulder) plotted with ocean profiles (PMEL,Seattle)

Next Generation NOAAServer Architecture l Client (user’s web browser) n Javascript and Java Applets l Mirror Site Web Server n Application logic n Graphics l Local Data Server n Present data as Objects to network l Existing Legacy System n SQL capable databases n netCDF, custom applications