Snowflake Serving up Climate Data

It is not often that data makes the news, but amidst the recent controversy about climate change data the UK Met Office released a set of historical climate records collected since the middle of the 19th century (www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html). At Snowflake we quickly spotted that this data is not only related to time, but also location. Seeing that the raw data is in the form of rather dry tables we couldn't resist the temptation to present it in a more visual form using some of the technologies and standards we regularly work with.

Using GO Publisher we have put together a service to serve up the data in the form of KML. This allows the data to be visualised in Google Earth and uses the time slider to show how temperatures change over time. The Met Office data is a large dataset, so our solution is to stream the data from our demo server using a Web Feature Service to serve only the data for the locations you are looking at. Google Earth follows network links to pick up the data and dynamically refresh it as you pan around the globe.

If you have Google Earth installed you can see it for yourself by opening the ClimateKmlLink.kml file with Google Earth.