Meteorology

Virtual Global Information System Centre (VGISC)

The objective of SIMDAT for the meteorology sector is to develop a virtual and consistent view of all meteorological data distributed in the real-time and archived databases of the partners and to provide a secure, reliable and efficient mechanism to collect, exchange and share these distributed data, in order to support research and operational activities of the meteorological community.

The meteorological centre of Germany (DWD), France (Météo-France) and United Kingdom (The Met Office), the two European organisations ECMWF and EUMETSAT, with the help of SIMDAT technology specialists, are developing and deploying a common system for the collection and sharing of distributed meteorological data. The Virtual Global Information System Centre (VGISC) partners will form a cluster, with partners enjoying equal rights and supporting one another. By the use of Grid technologies and standards and protocols for metadata, data discovery, transport and on-line browsing, the VGISC infrastructure will improve the load distribution and availability of the system and provide a uniform external interface to the users allowing them to easily locate, access and use the diverse distributed forms of data and their associated metadata.

VGISC infrastructure

The project will develop an infrastructure that brings together the data of the partners and provide access to distributed meteorological databases through VGISC. VGISC will be seen as a normal GISC and will fulfil the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Information System technical requirements. Some key elements of the project are:

improve visibility and access to data through a comprehensive discovery service based on metadata development
add value to existing data sets
offer a subscription services and a variety of reliable delivery services
provide a global access control policy managed by the partners and integrated into their existing security infrastructure

The software developed within the project will be made freely available to the WMO community.

VGISC architecture
The project will develop Grid-based data services for VGISC. Metadata systems, delivery and access tools will be developed to provide users with Grid services linking data discovery across distributed databases to dataset delivery.

Distributed Portal: users search and retrieve data, subscribe to services subject to authentication and authorization
Discovery Service: provides data searching facilities
Subscription Service: provides delivery scheduling
Transport Service: provides data delivery
Analysis Service: provides post-processing facilities
Security Service: verifies user identity and provides authorization credentials (data policy)
Management Service: provides administrator with management facilities
Monitoring Service: provides operators and users with monitoring facilities
Virtual Database Service: provides a single view of partners databases