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.

Web Accessible Folder

The Meteorological Services of Canada (MSC) Datamart provides a Web Accessible Folder (WAF) with machine access to weather, climate and water data as static files using open file formats. Machine access is possible programmatically or with utilities such as curl or wget. Using the WAF 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.

MSC Datamart provides WAF access to data at the following endpoint:

https://dd.weather.gc.ca/climate/

Geospatial web services

In addition to traditional data access mechanisms, the datasets are also provided through geospatial web services adhering to publically 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)
Web Feature Service (WFS)

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) at the following endpoints:

https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate

https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet (RDPA)

The following URLs provide examples of working with CCCS data in WMS :

Visualize a map of downscaled projected changes in annual temperature averaged over the 2081 to2100 period for the RCP8.5 emission scenario and for the 50^th percentile:
- https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.0&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=DCS.TM.RCP85.YEAR.2081-2100_PCTL50&STYLES=&CRS=EPSG:4326&BBOX=30,-150,85,-42&WIDTH=1800&HEIGHT=1200&FORMAT=image/png
Visualize a map of projected changes in total annual precipitation for the year 2100 for the RCP8.5 emission scenario
- https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.0&REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=CMIP5.PR.RCP85.YEAR.ANO_PCTL50&STYLES=&CRS=EPSG:4326&BBOX=30,-150,85,-42&WIDTH=1800&HEIGHT=1200&FORMAT=image/png&TIME=2100

Web Coverage Service (WCS)

The OGC Web Coverage Service provides a common interface to visualize geospatial gridded data. Typical use of WCS includes data extraction or subsetting for raster processing via formats such as NetCDF or GeoTIFF.

MSC GeoMet provides OGC WCS (versions 2.0.1) at the following endpoints:

https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate

https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet (CanSIPS/RDPA)

The following URLs provide examples of working with CCCS data in WCS:

Download projections, in a NetCDF format, of downscaled changes in annual temperature averaged over the 2081 to 2100 period for the RCP8.5 emission scenario and for the 50^th percentile:
- https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate?SERVICE=WCS&VERSION=2.0.1&REQUEST=GetCoverage&COVERAGEID=DCS.TM.RCP85.YEAR.2081-2100_PCTL50&SUBSETTINGCRS=EPSG:4326&SUBSET=x(-82,-76)&SUBSET=y(42,45)&FORMAT=image/netcdf
Download projections, in a GeoTIFF format, of changes in total annual precipitation for each year between 2060 and 2070 for the RCP8.5 emission scenario and for the 50^th percentile. In this case the download is for a sub-region centred around Winnipeg
- https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet-climate?SERVICE=WCS&VERSION=2.0.1&REQUEST=GetCoverage&COVERAGEID=CMIP5.PR.RCP85.YEAR.ANO_PCTL50&RANGESUBSET=B2060:B2070&SUBSETTINGCRS=EPSG:4326&SUBSET=x(-99.525146484375,-95.130615234375)&SUBSET=y(48.21003212234042,51.055207338584964)&FORMAT=image/tiff

Web Feature Service (WFS)

The OGC Web Feature Service provides a common interface to access geospatial feature data such as points or polygons. Typical use of WFS includes custom query / raw access to geospatial features. The MSC GeoMet WFS provides data in CSV and GeoJSON formats.

MSC GeoMet provides OGC WFS (version 3.0) at the following endpoint:

https://geo.weather.gc.ca/geomet/features

The following URLs provide examples of working with CCCS data in WFS: