MADIS Web Services In Support of Nextgen

Abstract

NOAA is investing in the transition of MADIS (Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System) into NWS operations to help improve performance for a wide-variety of service applications including the reduction of the nation's losses of life, property, and commerce caused by severe storms, drought, local high-impact weather, and toxic atmospheric plumes. MADIS supports these services areas by 1) improving the density, usability, reliability, timeliness, and accuracy of integrated surface and upper air observations used in local weather warning, model predictions, and hazardous situations, and 2) providing products in more easily accessible and usable formats that the federal government, industry, and society can better use to reduce risk and uncertainty, lower costs, and improve public safety and security. MADIS is also included in NOAA and FAA plans to provide observation capabilities for the Initial Operating Capability of the NextGen 4-D Weather Information Database (WIDB). Existing MADIS system capabilities include: - Flexible web-enabled data access methodologies - Integrated observational data with uniform formats and time stamps - Continuous database updates triggered by arriving observations - Increased observation data density and temporal resolution - Seamless access to real-time and saved datasets - Tiered observation quality control processing - Web-enabled push/pull distribution capabilities, with server-side subsetting capabilities - Secure authentication for proprietary data - On-the-fly, flexible, variable transformations and data reformatting The advantage of using MADIS to implement advanced web services for NextGen is the opportunity for a direct path into NWS operations, providing efficient, cost-effective, access to a broad cross-section of mission-critical information with core expertise in sub-orbital in situ and remotely sensed environmental observations. This paper will report on the recent addition of a Joint METOC Broker Language (JMBL) service for surface observations to the set of web services offered by MADIS, and present a gap analysis comparing the pre-existing MADIS web service subsetting capabilities with those offered by JBML services. Future work will focus in the near-term on implementing an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) for surface observations, and will include an analysis comparing JMBL and WFS capabilities. Longer term plans include providing additional observation datasets in the primary data transfer language selected for the WIDB.