sos4R and SOS for high resolution climate data

Upgrading sos4R and evaluating applicability of SOS 2.0 standard

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, NIWA (New Zealand) has been using 52°North Sensor Web components for several years. 52°North supported them in two major activities.

In addition to using the SOS for data access, NIWA would like to perform data analysis on top of this interface. The sos4R is a valuable component providing this functionality. However, the SOS standard has evolved significantly, not only during  sos4R’s lifetime, but also since its last major release. The sos4R has not been able to completely deal with the current SOS version 2.0 changes, thus 52°North had to upgrade the sos4R functionality package to SOS 2.0. User feedback on the current sos4R implementation also led to additional high-level functions to ease data discovery and retrieval (e.g. a convenience layer in sos4R facilitates data retrieval from SOS servers).

NIWA uses the SOS to serve different hydrological measurement values. To complement this existing infrastructure, NIWA is interested in using the 52°North SOS server  to serve high resolution climate data. A project was initiated to evaluate the applicability of the 52°North SOS to serve such data and to derive recommendations for potential implementation enhancements.

After working on an initial architecture design, 52°North conducted and completed the main implementation in 2019. This resulted in two new sos4R releases. In addition to upgrading the core library, special emphasis was put on the documentation. We published a range of enhanced Vignettes with the upgraded software.

52°North also deployed a new SOS instance to support the SOS-based provision of high resolution climate data and carried out data loading. Performance evaluation and SOS sever optimization continue.