OGC announces Water Data Summit

– The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces a Water Data Summit to be held at the UCAR/NCAR Center Green in Boulder, Colorado on June 3, 2015. This event is part of the June 2015 OGC Technical Committee Meeting.

The goal of the Water Data Summit is to stimulate engagement in development of tools and policies for the U.S. Open Water Data Initiative (OWDI). The Open Water Data Initiative will integrate different sources of water information into a connected, national water data framework and leverage existing systems, infrastructure and tools to underpin innovation, modeling, data sharing, and solution development.

Similar initiatives are being pursued in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other regions. The main objective of this particular event is to acquaint the OGC community and the broader geoscience community with recent advancements in high-resolution forecasting of precipitation, runoff, streamflow, and flooding across the continental U.S. in near-real time. These advancements represent the first time that surface water flows have been modeled and studied at the national scale. Similar data and tools from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) in UK and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Italy are being applied on a global scale through the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot.  The integrative framework, data and models being developed are enabling a major shift in the kinds of questions and issues scientists, meteorologists, and emergency response teams can start to address.

This research and development will be of interest to geoscientists in atmospheric and hydrological domains, as well as to operational meteorologists and even local-level public safety officials such as fire and police departments responsible for emergency response. The latter are among the key beneficiaries of this work.

For an agenda, details and registration, see the Water Data Summit web page. You must register to attend but there is no registration fee.

The OGC is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.