Advanced tools for accessing datasets
Overview
The Canadian Centre for Climate Services (CCCS) provides access to a variety of datasets. While users can download and view these datasets with the Climate data extraction tool and the Climate data viewer, we also provide a number of advanced tools that allow users to access the datasets in a bulk and/or automated fashion. These tools support vendor neutral, multi-application access and integration for a variety of uses. This page provides an overview of those advanced tools.
Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) Datamart
The MSC HTTPS raw data server (Datamart) is a source of raw weather, water, climate and environmental data. This service is aimed at specialized users with good meteorological and IT knowledge and is mainly meant to be accessed in an automatic manner via the Internet. Machine access is possible programmatically or with utilities such as curl or wget. Using the MSC Datamart allows users bulk/automated access to data. Note there is also a subscription service of the MSC Datamart using the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. It is highly recommended that you retrieve data using AMQP, which provides capabilities to subscribe to various datasets and have updates pushed to you as they are made available.
Geospatial web services
In addition to traditional data access mechanisms, the datasets are also provided through geospatial web services adhering to publicly available international standards. Geospatial web services are designed to support machine-to-machine interaction over a network and are typically utilized in a client/server computing environment made available through programmatic access, associated tools and applications.
These services adhere to open standards ratified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which enable interoperability and thus make data easy to discover, access, visualize and integrate. OGC and ISO standards play an important role in World Meteorological Organization interoperability and are supported by numerous off the shelf open source and commercial tools.
We provide its data via the Meteorological Service of Canada’s GeoMet service platform, offering the following geospatial web service APIs:
- Web Map Service (WMS)
- Web Coverage Service (WCS)
- OGC API - Coverages
- OGC API - Features
Web Map Service (WMS)
The OGC Web Map Service provides a common interface to visualize geospatial data layers. Typical use of WMS includes simple visualization in web browser or GIS applications via web friendly image formats such as PNG or JPEG.
MSC GeoMet provides OGC WMS (versions 1.1.1 - 1.3.0) access.
OGC API – Coverages and Web Coverage Service (WCS)
The OGC API – Coverages and OGC Web Coverage Service provide a common interface to visualize geospatial gridded data. Typical use includes data extraction or subsetting for raster processing via formats such as NetCDF or GeoTIFF.
MSC GeoMet provides OGC API-Coverages and WCS (versions 2.0.1) access.
OGC API – Features (formerly Web Feature Service (WFS))
The OGC API - Features provides a common interface to access geospatial feature data such as points or polygons. Typical use includes custom query / raw access to geospatial features. The OGC API - Features provides data in CSV and GeoJSON formats.
The following links provide examples of working with CCCS data in OGC API - Features:
- Inspect all available feature collections
- Query Daily climate data by year
- Query Daily climate data by station
GitHub
We provide a collaborative development space on GitHub, providing source code to various components and development documentation.
Data policy
Data are subject to the Meteorological Service of Canada Datamart End-User License; discovery metadata are available on the Canadian Open Data Portal.