Digital Weather Geography Markup Language (dwGML)

National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) 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, which is defined in a Service Description Document, 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.

NDFD dwGML contains forecasts for any combination of the meteorological parameters found in the database. A complete list of the elements can be found at the following web address:

http://www.weather.gov/ndfd/technical.htm#elements

For additional information on NDFD parameter definitions and available time projection, please see the NDFD technical page.

Users can retrieve all these NDFD parameters for a default time (current time plus 3 hours) and set of locations (193 cities across the United States and its territories). The default time is projected 3 hours into the future to ensure that data is available. By employing filtering in the query string that invokes the service, a user can retrieve other times and locations that are available in the NDFD database.

http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/OGC_services/

The schemas can be downloaded from:

http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/OGC_services/schema/dwGML_WFS_GMLv311.xsd
http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/OGC_services/schema/dwGML_WFS_GMLv212.xsd

plans are to expand the above schemas to include additional features that are more efficient at encoding National Weather Service forecast data. Two planned features will use coverages to capture the temporal and spatial dimensions of the gridded data. The NDFD goal is to determine which data structures are best suited to our data and then trim back the features to support those data models.