About the viewer: The Great Lakes Station Viewer uses OpenLayers, a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) toolkit, to request geospatial data from remote servers and deliver it through a map interface on a web browser. The datasets are housed on independent servers and made available as Web Map Services (WMS) or Web Feature Services (WFS). WMS elements include background satellite images or reference maps used by Google Maps or Yahoo Maps. WFS elements are streams of actual data that provide information about requested data themes, such as recent wave, wind or current observations.

The Great Lakes Station Viewer is built on top of the larger GLOS data aggregation infrastructure. The Station Viewer is being designed to harvest the latest data from observing stations and buoys on an hourly basis, although some observations are not updated that frequently. Once the data are validated, they are imported into the GLOS DMAC observation repository database, which is designed to track data over time and by location. When a query comes in from a web browser, the newest observation data are extracted from the repository, assembled for use in that particular transaction, and fed back to the viewer almost instantaneously.

Known strengths: The current version of the Great Lakes Station Viewer ingests data from most of the popular raw data transmission formats, such as GRIB2, NetCDF and OpenDAP, and converts these formats to standard GIS vector and raster data on the fly. The OpenLayers technology employed in this viewer will provide users with substantial future capabilities to add more sophisticated GIS queries.

Known weaknesses and future directions: The current conditions displayed in this viewer may be 24 hours old or more. No linkages currently exist to archives of historic observations, one of the capabilities the GLOS DMAC development team would like to explore.