Easy access to weather, ocean and water data

The aim of the GEOWOW (GEOSS interoperability for weather, ocean and water) project was to improve data discovery, access and use via the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). Visualisation tools were also developed.

Researchers identified water, ocean ecosystems and weather as research areas that could provide major societal benefit through an evolved GEOSS. Project partners also made use of case studies to demonstrate the value added of the different components of the improved architecture.

One such case study was river discharge modelling, which is used to manage water resources and mitigate or protect against flooding disasters. Researchers demonstrated a modelling scenario whereby river discharge was calculated using global weather forecast information. Other work included the development of software for forecasting cyclones and extreme weather events.

Sustainable development of the world's oceans requires an understanding of their state using a wide range of variables. GEOWOW therefore provided scientists with the means for assessing the state of the oceans and the ecosystems they contain. They were also able to determine threats to the oceansꞌ sustainability by developing environmental indicators for investigating the impact of acidification on marine habitats.

Project partners also evolved the GEO Data Access Broker, which ranks search results and offers semantic searching capabilities and improved access to data, services and models. Furthermore, it provides data exploitation capabilities like the Developer Cloud Sandbox, which enables GEOSS users to access and process data in the Cloud from their facilities.

The technological components developed by GEOWOW will help make complex scientific tasks easier by significantly improving data accessibility and exploitability. This will increase the potential for a broad uptake of GEOWOW solutions by different user communities, even beyond the project's lifetime.

Project outcomes will therefore enable easier access and exploitation of GEOSS resources by a variety of users and help make contributions to GEOSS simpler.