Weather Datacubes in Action: An Aviation Safety Use Case

Combining 2-D map data with 3-D satellite image timeseries and 4-D atmospheric timeseries naturall lead to datacubes as a common paradigm allowing for a unified treatment and fusion. Therefore, datacube services, pioneered by the rasdaman team, have received increasing attention recently. In comparison to the zillions of NetCDF or GRIB2 files, such datacubes offer more suitable abstractions, intuitive for humans and with APIs convenient for tools.

Suitability of datacubes for value-adding services has been demonstrated in the Cube4EnvSec (Datacubes for Environment and Security) project, an exemplary service for aviation safety has been established. Based on pilot-relevant weather forecasts obtained periodically every 6 hours from German Weather Service (DWD), forecast datacubes are built up and continually extended which have a spatial footprint covering Europe and surroundings and a temporal resolution of 1 hour at a length of meanwhile 3 years. New incoming 72h forecasts overwrite existing timeslices, extend with new timeslices, and keep the not overwritten timeslices, so the nowcasts, which constitute the long-tail timeseries. Variables accommodated include wind speed, temperature, icing, tropopause, volcanic ash and dust, and more. Additionally, via federation the lightning strike datacubes fed from observations by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) - a service built under the Colin Price research group at Tel Aviv University - are available, likewise with a temporal resolution of 1h. Altogether, the service currently holds 28 TB of datacubes, linked into the global EarthServer federation where ad-hoc fusion with, e.g., the Sentinel satellite timeseries of CoperniCUBE is possible.

Recently, in the FAIRgeo project advanced AI support is being added, making AI on datacubes simpler (e.g., 2 lines of query instead of 100 lines of Python code), safer (by enabling the datacube server to estimate accuracy of applying a model to the datacube region and time chosen), and faster (by integrating processing with the highly effective query optimization techniques of the datacube engine).

Access is based on OGC standards, thus enabling direct access through a wide spectrum of third-party clients. The most powerful way is the OGC Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) geo datacube query language which is on a high semantics level, thereby abstracting away all the coding complexities incurred, e.g., with Python.

Supported by live demos, we give a technical deep-dive showing key aspects of the aviation datacube service based on geo datacube queries based on the OGC/ISO WCPS standard, including: 4-D corridor datacube queries; zero-coding datacube interaction; dashboard-based datacube visualization; inference with 3rd party ML models on datacubes; cloud/edge integration; and more.