FetchClimate! Building a Geographical Web Service

A huge amount of climate data is available, covering the whole of the Earth surface. But even the experts find it ludicrously difficult to get the climate information they need: locate data sets, negotiate permissions, download huge files, make sense of file formats, get to grips with yet another library, filter, interpolate, regrid, etc! Enter FetchClimate, a fast, intelligent climate-data-retrieval service that operates over Windows Azure. FetchClimate can be used through a Silverlight web interface or from inside any .NET program. FetchClimate works at any grid resolution from global to a few kilometers, in a range of years from 1900 to 2010, on days within a year, and for hours within a day. When multiple data sources could answer your query, FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate, returning the requested values along with the level of uncertainty and the origin of the data. The entire query can be shared as a single URL, enabling others to retrieve the identical information.

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