Atmospheric Data Access for the Geospatial User Community

Many tools and data formats exist for atmospherical data. To disseminate this wealth of information to the geospatial communities is still very difficult. It is complicated to easily share data among scientists representing the geospatial communities without performing some cumbersome conversions. ADAGUC aims to reduce the need for scientists to invent their own converter tools. Selected space borne atmospheric and land datasets will be made accessible for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for data comparison, resampling, selection, manipulation and visualization. Both geospatial and atmospheric user communities are intensively involved in the project for the definition of the use cases. In the project the ESA's PSS-05 Lite standard for software development is used. It recognizes the following phases: 1) use case definition, 2) user requirements definition, 3) detailed design, 4) implementation, 5) integration and tests. During phase 1 and 2 we consulted the user communities. On the first ADAGUC workshop (October 2006) the following different user communities were identified: policy makers, atmospheric scientists, GIS users and the risk assessment community. These user communities identi- fied their needs in 7 usecases which have been translated to user requirements: several atmospheric data products (NO2, CH4, cloud fraction) and weather model products (precipitation, wind, boundary layer height). These data products should be delivered on a high processing level: gridded and reanalyzed data (level 3/4). The user commu-