1. DCPC Development in the Hong Kong Observatory
Hong Kong, China
The 1st GISC Seoul International Workshop
(November 2012)

2. DCPC for WWIS
Data Collection and Production Centre for World Weather Information Services

3. Content Introduce the World Weather Information System (WWIS)
Introduce key components of the DCPC for WWIS
Summary in developing DCPC for WWIS

4. WWIS Background (1)
The Commission of Basic Systems (CBS) of WMO at its 12th Session at Geneva (27 Nov – 8 Dec 2000) discussed the need to strengthen the recognition of the public weather services that NMHSs provide through the setting up of a pilot project.
To establish a centralized source to access official weather information issued by NMHSs and make it available for use by all WMO Members for dissemination to the public and the media.

5. WWIS Background (2)
The Commission agreed that Hong Kong, China, would take the lead in the development and act as the information collection center.
The Commission also designated Hong Kong, China to serve as the coordinator of WWIS operation in collaboration with other WMO Members.

6. WWIS - Objectives
To develop and enhance the methodologies for the international exchange of public forecasts issued by NMHSs via the Internet;
To provide a centralized source of official weather information on the Internet;
To encourage the international media and the public to make good use of official weather information provided by NMHSs; and
To enhance the visibility of NMHSs, especially those of developing countries, so as to strengthen the public recognition of the weather services they provide.

7. World Weather Information Service (http://worldweather.wmo.int)

8. Current Status (1)
The WWIS now serves the international public in 10 languages:
English (2001)
Arabic (2003)
Chinese (2004)
Portuguese (2004)
Spanish (2006)
French (2007)
German (2009)
Italian (2009)
Russian (2011)
Polish (2011)

9. Current Status (2)
The WWIS now serves the international public in 10 languages:
Hong Kong Observatory
Meteorological Department, Directorate General of Civil Aviation and Meteorology, Sultanate of Oman
China Meteorological Administration
Macao Meteorological and Geophysical Bureau and Meteorology Institute of Portugal
Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia of Spain
Meteo France
Deutscher Wetterdienst
Servizio Meteorologico dell'Aeronautica Militare Italiana
Russian Federation
National Research Institute (IMGW-PIB) of the Republic of Poland

10. Current Status (3)

11. Current Status (4)
Provide official observations and forecasts to essentially all over the world.
By Oct 2012, there were:
133 WMO Members supply official weather forecasts for 1669 cities;
166 WMO Members also have their climatological data for 1653 cities.

12. Current Status (5) Red dots – Weather Forecast and Climatology
Black dots – Climatology

13. World Weather Information Service (WWIS)
MyWorldWeather –
The iPhone mobile application
The iPhone mobile version of the World Weather Information Service (WWIS) website
The world's first ever location-specific weather service providing official city weather forecasts under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

14. World Weather Information Service (WWIS)

15. Data Collection and Production Centre for World Weather Information Services (DCPC for WWIS)

16. Milestones of DCPC for WWIS
Nov 2008  Thinking about the possibility of having Hong Kong, China, being DCPCs in one or two aspects relating to PWS, in particular, to specialize in world city forecasts. The concept was supported by the project team of WIS.
CBS-XIV (mid-2009)  DCPC for WWIS was listed as one of 39 proposed DCPC.
Nov 2009  Hong Kong Observatory officers visited the CMA’s WIS centre in Beijing.
Dec 2009  Hong Kong Observatory obtained kind support from both CMA and JMA for connecting the GISCs Beijing and Tokyo with the DCPC Hong Kong.

17. Development progress System design of DCPC for WWIS system (late 2009)
Metadata design and system configuration (Jan – Feb 2010)
Trial operation stage (late Feb 2010)
1 dedicated server at HKO Headquarters for data processing
2 dedicated servers at Internet service provider to provide DAR services and metadata to GISCs
Interoperability testing with GISCs Beijing and Tokyo (2010)
Designated as the DCPC of the WMO Information System at the 16th World Meteorological Congress (Cg-XVI) (2011)

18. Products and Services Data Discovery, Access and Retrieval (DAR)
Provide an Internet website for searching and displaying WWIS data; and
Handle user access via the Internet by searching a DAR catalogue using subject keywords, geographic extent, or temporal range.
Metadata
Metadata management and uploading the metadata to GISC.

19. Products and Services
User acquires metadata from GISC and retrieve data from DCPC
User search for metadata from GISC
GISC returns metadata instance
User retrieve data from DCPC based on the metadata acquired.
DCPC returns data to the user
GISC – Metadata Harvester
GISC harvests metadata from DCPC using Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol
DCPC returns metadata records to GISC; and

20. Technical Aspect

21. Technical Aspect Oper. Sys. : Linux DB server : MySQL (~3GB)
App. server : PHP 21

22. Three Major Functions
Provides online services for global users to search and access the official weather forecasts and climatological information;
Offers subscription service for user to receive automatically weather information of interest; and
Provides metadata of the weather information available at the DCPC for WWIS to other systems such as Global Information Centres (GISCs) of the WIS for user to search the weather information via the GISC’s DAR services.

23. DCPC for WWIS website
RSS Reader
Forecast Products

24. Summary
The DCPC for WWIS is a specific and relatively small scale system;
All the information is extracted form existing WWIS system and the effort in collecting data is rather minimal;
Data subscription via standard RSS reader;
The technique can be used for other small systems such as DCPC for SWIC;
Valuable experience in metadata synchronization between DCPCs and GISCs.

25. Thank You