Conference Paper

The CryoSphere service [1] developed within the EarthServer project
[2] is designed to help the community discover and assess Snow Cover
products prepared by CryoLand [3]. These products are published on a
daily basis and in various resolutions over various regions. The user
community is interested in analyzing snow properties and coverage over
time and in relevant spatial subsets. So far, the only possibility was
to download the data and develop an analysis tool for offline usage.
This is where the EarthServer approach comes in.

Having EarthServer infrastructure running in the background, a web
client allows the user to calculate and plot basic statistics over a
given time of interest. Additional data such as elevation models and
river basin districts make it possible to look on exotic spatial
subsets like contour levels and watershed areas. The client then
dynamically creates a WCPS query based on the underlying model data.
The WCPS query defines the temporal subset, various spatial subset
masks such as a riverbasin district and the actual calculation using
one or more snow products. The server then processes the request and
sends back the raw results as CSV which then can be displayed in the
browser.

The service entirely uses open source tools and OGC interfaces. Based
on rasdaman, an array database holding and processing the data, the
service also makes use of EOxServer which handles the EO-metadata. The
OGC standards WCPS, (EO-)WMS, (EO-)WCS, WMTS and WFS are used for the
communication between server and client. This talk will go into detail
regarding the service design as well as the concept behind the
EarthServer approach.

[1] http://earthserver.eox.at
[2] http://earthserver.eu
[3] http://cryoland.eu