Web-based Mobile Client and Server Grid Data Service for Accessing High Resolution Weather Information

The new era of forecast decision model was led by the usage of numerical weather prediction to ensure forecast accuracy. Weather information providers give accuracy, speed and appropriate information to different basic needs of the users. Unfortunately, service providers that meet those three criteria are still rare (especially in developing countries). A combination of PC-Cluster, NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction) and GDS (Grid Data Service) can be used as a low-cost solution in providing weather information which meets those three criteria. This paper presents a proof-of-concept web-based application using GrADS (Grid Analysis and Display System), GrADS Data Server, and GrADS interface to PHP. This was designed to give access to the weather online database to the server-side, which can then assist users from the mobile client in representing the weather prediction. Although the features of the resulting information service (Web Service, GDS and User defined data access) can already assist users in accessing weather information, improvements are still needed especially for delivering of high resolution weather information.