Efficient Access to Climate Products using ACIS Web Services
D espite the proliferation of in situ, modeled, and remotely sensed climate data over the last decade, users of these datasets outside of the research community cite numerous hurdles to the effective use of these data in decision making (e.g., Overpeck et al. 2011; Beniston, et al. 2012). These reviews describe many climate datasets as large, covering geographic domains of little interest to users having a need for only a small subset of these data. The studies mention a range of data formats that complicate the use of data from different networks. Gridded datasets, as well, are stored in a variety of data formats and projections. Based on decades of experience, the Regional Climate Center (RCC) Program has found that end users are often frustrated by the onerous tasks of downloading and parsing large volumes of irrelevant data, reformat-ting files, and recreating commonly used analyses. These steps introduce potential errors to the data stream and are inefficient uses of human and financial resources. The World Bank recently labeled data that are " hard to use " as a barrier, stating, " Developers tend to use data they can easily access and understand— which may not be the most current, comprehensive or robust data available " (http://data.worldbank.org /news/climate-data-meeting-discussion). In many real-time applications (e.g., the monitoring of extremes), climate datasets are dynamic in that they are constantly evolving as either new data are added or earlier observations are updated to replace missing values or reflect more rigorous quality control. This can lead to suboptimal decisions based on data that, although complete and of the highest quality when downloaded, no longer reflect the best-available data source. This is especially true in static graphical and tabular data products that, once produced, are not refreshed to reflect new or amended input data. For instance, the number of degree days accumulated during February 2013 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was queried on websites operated by private, state, and federal entities as well as a site using the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS). Of the four values (740, 828, 830, and 830), only those from ACIS and the National Weather Service (NWS) agreed, as the other sources omitted daily observations that were initially missing or used nonstandard conventions for summing fractional degree-day values. Although any original data values failing quality control are retained in the ACIS database, they are marked as invalid and by default excluded from data products. …