Standards dramatically advance streamflow and flood forecasting in US and elsewhere – Part 3 of 5
This is a story about how water data standards, computational hard work, high-performance computing, serendipity and synergy led to an operational capability for nationwide forecasting of streamflow and flooding at high-resolution, in near-real-time. This has been evolving for several years now, but has gone into hyper-drive in just the last couple years.
This is Part 2 of a multipart series. Click here for Part 1 or Part 3.
First, I’d like to mention some comments to Part 1, in which I posed a question: “A small but committed number of academic researchers are helping develop OGC standards, but the vast majority are not. Why do some get into it, and why don't more?”
On Friday, January 18, 2013, about 40 folks attended the OGC EarthCube Summit, co-located with the OGC Technical Committee meeting earlier that week.
(updated 4 July 2012)
There are several projects underway or already committed in the OGC related to water resources information systems, and because of the widespread and international nature of these activities it seems like a good time for a general update.
There's a debate in the geo blogosphere about "Big Data" versus spatial data infrastructure (SDI), that is, deriving information from searches of unstructured data versus deriving information from structured data.