UK Met Office Climate Data

The web services below show the new KML/KMZ functionality that is provided by the GO Publisher WFS,

It is not often that data makes the news, but amidst the recent controversy about climate change data the UK Met Office released a set of historical climate records collected since the middle of the 19th century (www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html). At Snowflake we quickly spotted that this data is not only related to time, but also location. Seeing that the raw data is in the form of rather dry tables we couldn't resist the temptation to present it in a more visual form using some of the technologies and standards we regularly work with.

Using GO Publisher we have put together a service to serve up the data in the form of KML. This allows the data to be visualised in Google Earth and uses the time slider to show how temperatures change over time. The Met Office data is a large dataset, so our solution is to stream the data from our demo server using a Web Feature Service to serve only the data for the locations you are looking at. Google Earth follows network links to pick up the data and dynamically refresh it as you pan around the globe.

Climate Data as Google Earth compressed KMZ

GO Publisher WFS serving data dynamically streamed into a Google Earth as KMZ

To display the obstacle data in Google Earth we encode the URL on the WFS into a Google Earth network link. Clicking on the KML files below will take you to a start location, after that zooming and panning will connect back to the server in Southampton and stream the appropriate obstacles in compressed KML from GO Publisher WFS depending on your location with Google Earth.

If you have Google Earth installed you can see it for yourself by opening the ClimateKmlLink.kml file with Google Earth.

Network tags call the compressed streamed WFS URL as above and have a maxFeatures set to 1000

Here's what you'll see:

 

Google Earth Network link for Climate Data

Here's the kml used in the ClimateKmlLink.kml Network link:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.2"> <Folder> <name>UK Met Office World Historical Climate Data</name> <description>Historical temperature data provided by UK Met Office</description> <NetworkLink> <name>Historical Climate Sites</name> <description>Historical Climate Sites These placemarks show locations where temoeratures have been recorded, but without the climate data itself. The Historical Temperatures folder contains the temperature data itself.</description> <flyToView>0</flyToView> <Link> <href>http://demo.snowflakesoftware.com:8080/climateStationsKml/climatestationskml?service=wfs&version=1.1.0&request=GetFeature&typename=Placemark&</href> <viewRefreshMode>never</viewRefreshMode> <viewRefreshTime>1</viewRefreshTime> </Link> </NetworkLink> <NetworkLink> <name>Historical Temperatures</name> <description>Historical temperature data. Because of the large amounts of data in this data set only ten locations are shown at a time selected from the area you are currently viewing. Zoom in so that only a small number of sites are shown to see data for particular locations. Use the time slider to see temperature changing over time. Colours show the June temperature for each year. Click on the placemark for monthly temperatures for the year.</description> <flyToView>0</flyToView> <Link> <href>http://demo.snowflakesoftware.com:8080/climateKml/climatekml?service=wfs&version=1.1.0&request=GetFeature&typename=Folder&maxfeatures=10&</href> <viewRefreshMode>onStop</viewRefreshMode> <viewRefreshTime>1</viewRefreshTime> <viewFormat>BBOX=[bboxWest],[bboxSouth],[bboxEast],[bboxNorth]</viewFormat> </Link> </NetworkLink> </Folder> </kml>

 

GO Publisher WFS Climate Data Landing pages

GO Publisher WFS is used to provide the service which streams the KMZ to Google Earth. While KMZ is not technically GML it is an OGC standard and share enough common concepts for the GO Publisher WFS to be used.

Landing page	GetCapabilities	DescribeFeature
http://demo.snowflakesoftware.com:8080/climateKml	GetCapabilities	DescribeFeatureType
http://demo.snowflakesoftware.com:8080/climateStationsKml	GetCapabilities	DescribeFeatureType