Global Cryosphere Watch

Introduction

The World Meteorological Organization's Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) is a mechanism for supporting all key cryospheric in-situ and remote sensing observations, and it facilitates the provision of authoritative data, information, and analyses on the state of the cryosphere.

To achieve this, a real-time and long-time series of data and products will have to be made available to all consumers. Data and products are made by NMHSs and other operational and scientific communities. The latter two often have limited resources, relying on a variety of data management approaches, quite different from those of the WMO community. GCW is establishing a link between these communities through WIS and WIGOS. In order to successfully implement GCW, barriers between communities need to be lowered.

Project description

The GCW Data Management is a metadata-driven service-oriented approach. GCW data management is based on the FAIR guiding principles and aligns well with the WIS principles.

It follows a metadata-driven approach where datasets are documented by standardized discovery metadata that are exchanged through standardized Web services. The GCW Data Portal can interface with scientific and other data providers with WMO-specific interfaces like real-time exchange through WMO GTS. For all other purposes, the Internet is used as a communication network. A critical component of the discovery metadata exchanged is the application of a standardized semantic annotation of data and interfaces, for example using ontologies as well as linkages between datasets and additional information useful to fully understand a dataset (e.g. WIGOS information).