GCDViewer: An online data query, visualization and analysis system for global climatic data

Climatic data are critical in supporting of the agricultural and ecological studies. Traditionally, the way of managing and accessing to the data is locally fulfilled. To demonstrate the value of cyberinfrastructure and to ease the access to the data, this paper presented a case study of managing, visualizing and analyzing the global multi-station climatic data in a Web-based environment. This study took 1961-1990 global standard climate normals data published by World Meteorological Organization as an exemplar. It proposed a relational data model to store the climate normals data. It utilized SQL Server to store and manage the data as Web-accessible data services, ArcGIS Server as GIS Server to enable on-demand accessuser operation map and presented an ASP.Net-based web portal for scientists to fulfill data search, data visualization and data analysis functions. The system design and the implementation details of this prototype are introduced. This case study clearly shows that the unstructured climatic text data could be transformed to be structured database, which further enables the on-demand data sharing, search, retrieval and online analysis functions. GCDViewer´s design principle and system architecture could apply to many other types of scientific data. It clearly shows the advantage of building cyberinfrastructure to improve the overall research efficiency.