A Web Service-based Framework for Temporal/Spatial Environmental Data Access

The Weather Forecast and Climate Studies Center (CPTEC) of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) is responsible for weather and climate forecasts and weather data collection and dissemination. Data is collected from several different systems and networks, with different sensors and features. Data is available through the Institute's web site through searchable web pages, which allows the easy retrieval of small amounts of information stored on the servers at a time, but only for a specific type of data (e.g. sensor). Although they serve their main purpose, these interfaces present limited usability: if an user needs to create a composite query involving different sensors or even different temporal/spatial slices of the data, this user will need to perform several queries while storing the intermediate results. In this paper we present a framework to access data and metadata stored in CPTEC's server that allows composition of complex queries through web services. These web services cover several different data sources, allowing the exploration of the data in ways not considered by the institute. Some simple case studies and first results are demonstrated.