Accessing meteorological data in INSPIRE

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

In the information age, information is of vital importance to the economic and social development of a country. Meteorological data, is multidimensional, continually evolving, highly spatial and highly temporal in nature. It is of great importance to a wide range of stakeholders including national agencies, private weather services, defense, transportation, aviation, national infrastructures, financial institutions and the general public. Members of the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) have vast amounts of data. However, this data is stored in many different formats based on various conceptual models (e.g. BUFR, GRIB, NetCDF, HDF). INSPIRE is a European Union initiative to create interoperability between spatial datasets among various communities. The main goal of this project is to suggest the most appropriate INSPIRE Download Service to access meteorological data. This project uses BUFR data and tries to access it through Climate Science Modeling Language (CSML), which is a data model and software framework for accessing meteorological data and retrieve it through standard geospatial web services. Based on the testing, suitable INSPIRE Download Service will be suggested. This helps to bridge the gaps between the geospatial, meteorological communities, and policy makers.