3D PAWS

NCAR/Research Applications Laboratory

3D Printed Automated Weather Station (PAWS)

Accurate and reliable real-time monitoring and dissemination of observations of surface weather conditions is critical for a variety of societal applications.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) International Activities Office (IAO) in partnership with University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) has started an initiative to develop and deploy low-cost weather instrumentation in sparsely observed regions of the world.

Instrumentation is being designed using innovative new technologies such as 3D printers, Raspberry Pi computing systems, and wireless communications.

CHORDS
Cloud-Hosted Realtime
Data Services
for the Geosciences

CHORDS is supported by the National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative, which is a community-led cyberinfrastructure initiative for the geosciences.

You are looking at a CHORDS Portal. This is a web service that allows scientists to easily provide Internet access to real-time streaming data. Typically these data are measurements made by diverse instruments, which are deployed in support of a particular research effort.

Each research team can operate their own portal, which is created simply by running a copy of the CHORDS appliance on Amazon cloud services. This provides a web server and database. CHORDS can both ingest and deliver data via simple http: requests, just like any web browser. Configuration and management of your private CHORDS server is also done through a web interface. Any user on the Internet can attach to the data streams using tools of their choice, such as Matlab, Excel, Python, web browsers; i.e. anything that is able to issue an http: request.

CHORDS portals can also forward real-time data streams to higher level CHORDS services, which might provide functions such as OGC compliant formatting, mapping services, federation, and just about anything else you can think of.

The goals of CHORDS are:

• To lower the barrier for disemminating real-time geoscience observations via the Internet.
• To provide a simple, "shrink-wrapped" and inexpensive service that will be especially attractive to teams that do not have IT expertise and budgets.
• To provide standards-based interoperability with next level processing systems.

Citing CHORDS

CHORDS has been issued a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) from DataCite.org.

We request that researchers cite CHORDS usage in any relevant publication or other context as follows:

Portal Status

Sponsor Acknowledgements

CHORDS is being developed for the National Science Foundation’s EarthCube program under grants 1639750, 1639720, 1639640, 1639570 and 1639554.