Summary
Lincoln Laboratory has developed a set of information models for the encoding and distribution of data products from the National Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) prototype, currently operating at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. CIWS data products can be categorized as gridded and non-gridded. Gridded products are typically expressed as rectangular arrays whose elements contain a data value coinciding with uniformly-spaced observations or computed results on a 2-D surface. Gridded data arrays map to earth's surface through a map projection, for example, Lambert Conformal or Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area. Non-gridded data products express observations or computed results associated with singular or sparsely distributed sets of geo-spatial locations such as points, curves, or contours. CIWS prototype data products were used to develop, refine, and evaluate reference information models for the CIWS gridded and non-gridded data. Data packaging methods were evaluated and selected on the basis of public-domain open-source availability and metadata support. Network Common Data Format (NetCDF), provided by Unidata, was selected as the information model for gridded CIWS products. For the non-gridded products, XML schemas have been developed along with sample XML instances to illustrate schema-compliant product encodings. These models follow and extend upon a number of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and ISO standards including Geography Markup Language (GML), Observations and Measurements (OM), and Eurocontrol's Weather Exchange Model (WXXM). This document is intended to serve as a reference for the description of CIWS data product files.