"Global Winds" GEOSS Demo

By George Percivall
Executive Director, Interoperability Architecture
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

The 2003 Earth Observation Summit (EOS) called for an international effort to establish a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Sixty-one countries and forty international organizations, including the OGC, are now involved in GEOSS.

In a "system of systems" for Earth observation, thousands of diverse systems must ultimately interoperate through published, free, universally adopted interface and encoding standards. The OGC has been working closely with IEEE, ISPRS, and other organizations to demonstrate in multiple venues that existing standards -- many from the OGC -- can be applied to accomplish a wide range of GEOSS objectives. The demos also point out gaps in the standards platform that could be filled by specific activities within the standards organizations that provide the standards.

The IEEE organized a GEOSS demonstration on 22-23 May 2006 at the 2006 International Symposium on Future Intelligent Earth Observing Satellites (FIEOS'06) in Beijing, China. This was the third in a series of such workshops. The workshop, "The User and GEOSS Architecture III", or "Global Winds," focused on wind energy. Dr. Jinsoo You and Dr. Konstantin Nurutdinov of the Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham, UK organized the demonstration, which showed the role of the OGC's standards in the open architecture that underpins the GEOSS "system of systems." Eighteen organizations from six countries participated in the demonstration.

A typical search operation for wind resource data (NASA - Earth-Sun System Gateway)

The first stage of the demo involved searching for suitable data registered in Web-based catalogs that implement the OpenGIS® Catalogue Service Implementation Specification.

The initial assessment stages involved wind data at the regional scale. During this demo, a significant global wind data set was made available from NOAA's National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) using OGC Web Services. Two years of National Weather Service Global Forecast System (GFS) numerical model monthly mean wind data were available using the OGC WCS on NOMADS Servers. Based on a regional analysis of China, the Hainan Dao (Island) was selected for a more detailed evaluation.

NASA Global Winds dataset. Small arrows show wind direction. Getting this data available via OWS was a big deal and of great interest to the community.

The next stages of the demo involved browsing global wind data, reviewing the discovered data, reviewing wind farm sites and getting data for further analysis. Wind speed ranges were selected and the results displayed. Areas of candidate sites were calculated. Candidate wind farm sites with suitable wind regimes were selected and measurements were made of the distance between the sites and the nearest roads and power transmission lines. All these operations involved applications in which one or more OpenGIS Specifications had been implemented.

Partial map layers of processed wind data through WMS (NRCan/GeoConnections and Environment Canada)

 

10m above ground average wind speed (processed by IMAA/CNR and University of Nottingham)

Upcoming Demos of the GEOSS Services Network (GSN)

To support GEOSS, OGC members built the GEOSS Services Network (GSN), a persistent network of publicly accessible OpenGIS-accessible services for demonstration and research regarding interoperability arrangements in GEOSS. GSN, which draws from data, services and other resources in the broader OGC Network, is the basis for demonstrations in the GEOSS Workshop series.

Other GEOSS interoperability demos are scheduled:

• July 30 in Denver, CO at IGARSS 2006 (2006 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium & 27th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing). The GSN demo will be managed by George Mason University.
• Sept 25-26 in Goa, India at the ISPRS Comm IV (International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing - Commission IV) conference. The GSN demo will be managed by University College of London.
• October 28-29 in Cairo, Egypt at the Sixth AARSE (African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment) conference. The GSN demo will be managed by University College of London.
• November 8 in Santiago, Chile at the 9th International Conference of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure. The GSN demo will be managed by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN).

The OGC invites all interested parties to attend and to participate in the demos.

(Figures for this OGC User story are from a presentation titled, "Implementing the GEOSS Architecture using open standards -- GEOSS Demonstrator using OGC Specifications," given at "The User and GEOSS Architecture" workshop, 22-23 May 2006. Authors: Dr. Jinsoo You, Dr. Konstantin Nurutdinov, Prof. Mike Jackson of the Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham.)