OGC Announces Water Data Summit
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced a Water Data Summit to be held at the UCAR/NCAR Center Green in Boulder, Colorado. USA, on 3 June 2015. This event is part of the June 2015 OGC Technical Committee Meeting. The goal of the Water Data Summit is to stimulate engagement in development of tools and policies for the U.S. Open Water Data Initiative (OWDI). The Open Water Data Initiative will integrate different sources of water information into a connected, national water data framework and leverage existing systems, infrastructure and tools to underpin innovation, modelling, data sharing and solution development.
Similar initiatives are being pursued in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other regions. The main objective of this particular event is to acquaint the OGC community and the broader geoscience community with recent advancements in high-resolution forecasting of precipitation, runoff, streamflow and flooding across the continental US in near real time. These advancements represent the first time that surface water flows have been modelled and studied at the national scale. Similar data and tools from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) in UK and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Italy are being applied on a global scale through the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot. The integrative framework, data and models being developed are enabling a major shift in the kinds of questions and issues scientists, meteorologists and emergency response teams can start to address.
Broad Interest
This research and development will be of interest to geoscientists in atmospheric and hydrological domains, as well as to operational meteorologists and even local-level public safety officials such as fire and police departments responsible for emergency response. The latter are among the key beneficiaries of this work.
For an agenda, details and registration, see the Water Data Summit web page. Registration is required to attend but there is no registration fee.
