Updates to the search interface and the catalogue

By steingod |

Recently the search interface and backend services supporting this has received a number of upgrades which have improved functionality. We are now harvesting metadata on a regular basis from several partners, but some issues still need to be handled. Some problems are handled in the harvest process or prior to ingestion, but some issues require handling on the provider side.

The last improvements have added visualisation and transformation of timeseries in addition to gridded data. Gridded data are now supported in the time dimension, but not very well in the vertical dimensions. Timeseries works for data served through OPeNDAP and following the Climate and Forecast convention 1.6 or higher (and that includes the featureType attribute). It is however still a very novel service. Work is in progress to support parent/child relationsships between datasets as several of the contributing data centres are supporting this. Work is also in progress concerning visualisation and transformation of profile data (e.g. CTD, permafrost, soundings).

Upcoming services include a conformance checker for NetCDF files against the Climate and Forecast convention and the Attribute Convention for Dataset Discovery.

An example timeseries plot where the air pressure of a weather station where data are extracted from WMO Global Telecommunication System for real time exchange of information. Below the air prssure is plotted for every 150th data point (to save time getting the first grasp of the data). Data can also be converted to a Comma Separated file using the transformation interface.