GML-powered Weather Hits United States

This week we added the National Weather Service's WFS to our suite of products including CarbonTools PRO, Gaia 3.2, and CarbonArc PRO. In short - the NWS WFS rocks! A sneak peak is above.

What's the NDFD WFS?

The National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) experimental Web Feature Service (WFS) is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium WFS standard and provides the public, government agencies, and commercial enterprises with data from the National Weather Service’s (NWS) digital forecast database. This service provides NWS customers and partners the ability to request NDFD data over the internet and receive the information back in a Geography Markup Language (GML) format which is also a Open Geospatial Consortium standard. The request/response process is made possible by the NDFD WFS server.

Why an NDFD WFS?

The National Weather Service is striving to serve society’s needs for weather information by evolving its services from a text paradigm to one based on making NWS information available quickly, efficiently, and in convenient and understandable forms. The NDFD is one example of this transformation. NDFD WFS takes yet another step towards a digital services era by making NDFD data available for computer to computer transfer and processing.

- Jeff