Interpolation of Precipitation Sensor Measurements using OGC Web Services

The standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) provide a broad foundation for web-based geographical applications. As one of these the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), which comprises standards for the consumerand provider-oriented sensor viewpoint, allows data requests of real-time sensor measurements and observations, abstracting from the inherent sensor particularities. The sensor measurements are essentially raw data which must be interpreted either visually or by using further processing to generate knowledge out of that data. The web-based automated interpolation of precipitation measurements in the Wupper area, presented in this work, shows how a near-real-time processing of sensor data can be used to produce in-situ validation data sets for GMES or environmental models and a user-friendly precipitation distribution map. The OGC Web Services SOS (Sensor Observation Service), WPS (Web Processing Service) and WMS (Web Map Service) are chained opaque to perform the interpolation and provide the result.