Interactive access to climate data from Germany

In recent years, the DWD has significantly expanded free access to its climate observations. A first step was a simple FTP site with the possibility to download archives with different data categories, e.g. national and international station-based meteorological data, derived parameters, gridded products, and special categories like phenological data. The data are based on the DWD's observation systems for Germany as well as on the DWD's international activities.

Based on the consistent implementation of OGC standards, an interactive and user-friendly access to the data has been created with the development of the DWD climate portal.

In addition to browsing, previewing, running basic analysis and downloading the data, the available OGC services enable users to set up their own services on the DWD data. Along with the free and extended access to the data and services, the users' demands on the availability, quality, and detail of the metadata also increased significantly. Maintaining and linking metadata to the opendata and services remains a challenge. However, INSPIRE and WIGOS are paving the way to a unified solution and overcoming the problems.

Another challenging requirement was to provide interactive access to long time series from gridded products to the users. To accomplish this, we have moved away from a previously file-based approach to storing the raster data as a georaster in an Oracle database. This design allows us a combined analysis of raster and station data not only in the climate data portal but also in the central climate database.

The presentation will provide a technical and functional overview of the DWD climate data portal.