WAYLAND, Mass. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — January 5, 2010 — Meteo-France, the UK Met Office, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) recently held the 2nd Workshop on, The Use of GIS/OGC Standards in Meteorology at the Conference International Centre at Meteo-France, Toulouse, France, from 23-25 November 2009. See http://www.meteo.fr/cic/meetings/gis-ogc/ for details.

Workshop participants reviewed applications of OGC and other standard Web services, encodings, and analytical methodologies being used across the meteorology community; discussed the relationship between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and OGC; and defined a roadmap for further activities of the OGC Meteorology & Oceanography Domain Working Group. This working group provides an open forum on meteorological and oceanographic systems interoperability and a formal process for developing international consensus standards that may be submitted to the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) for adoption.

David Arctur, Director of Interoperability Programs at OGC said, “This workshop and the successful 2008 workshop hosted by ECMWF and the UK Met Office showed many implementations of the OGC Web Map Service Interface Standard (WMS) for meteorology. Using this standard and others improves the usability of weather information in fields such as aviation, transportation and disaster management. We are looking forward to deepening the already very good relationship that the OGC has with the Meteo and Oceanographic communities in the future.”

The Met Office ( http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/) and Meteo-France ( http://france.meteofrance.com/) are the UK’s and France’s National Weather Services. They are among the world’s leading weather forecast centres and main contributors to the United Nations University Global Environment Information Centre (GEIC).

The European Centre for Medium range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) ( http://www.ecmwf.int) is an international European organization located in Reading, UK. It is the world’s leading centre for Medium Range Forecast.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

Meteo-France
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Frédéric Guillaud, (+33) 5-6107-8118
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Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
Athina Trakas, +49-228-54889942
Director, Business Development, Europe
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