OGC standard that makes complex environmental data easier to use in GIS

The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has approved the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using GML Coverage Application Schema, an extension to the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard that has emerged as a widely used and well supported data model and encoding for domains such as atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, meteorology, and hydrology. It supports multi-dimensional data representing space and time-varying phenomena. The new extension to the OGC CF-netCDF standards suite specifies how CF-netCDF datasets are encoded to conform to “OGC Implementation Schema for Coverages.” Coverages are data such as the output of weather and climate forecast models, weather station and ocean buoy observations, balloon soundings, ground-base radar, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and LIDAR point clouds. This extension specifies how these complex multi-dimensional CF-netCDF data are encoded as OGC coverages for use in geographic information systems (GIS) or other geospatial systems.
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