Hi all,
I’ve been browsing the archives looking for pointers on getting some time-series raster data published. And as usual, I’m left with noob questions :-).
Background: I’m looking to publish results of various weather-derived models. The outputs are at 15-kilometer resolution, and cover about 800 by 1000 kilometers. The models run every day and we have data going back 15 years. So by the time I retire we’re talking 10,000 rasters of that size. (Or more; the National Weather Service is contemplating 4K resolution!)
I had assumed that I’d be using PostGIS rasters for this. It seemed improbable that GeoServer would nimbly handle 10,000 files for each model (we have about 8 of them). First question: Is that correct, or will it be happy managing all those files? (Obviously I’d have to use the REST API to manage them!) Since the ImageMosaicJDBC plugin doesn’t handle timesteps, that might not work at all for me.
Second question: the image mosaic time series tutorial publishes a fixed set of TIFs. Just to be clear: as TIFs with new timestamps are added to the store, do they automatically become available?
Thirdly, said tutorial ends with “Create and publish a Layer from mosaic indexes”. I’m not getting the intent there – a combination of my thickness and the tutorial written by someone for whom English is not their first language. Don’t get me wrong, it’s overall very clear and I’m grateful to the author! (I’m sure my competence in their native language is laughable at best.) But I’m baffled by what this particular step does – what are the “footprints of the images”, and why would the user want to get them? This has to do only with spatial indexing, and nothing to do with the time dimension, correct?
Finally, there’s one possible optimization: Although we need to keep the data going back for basically ever, and need to be able to do various calculations on it and map the results by hand, if push comes to shove, we only have to present the most recent visualizations automatically on the Web. So for example, perhaps I can use the IMJDBC plugin if I add a timestamp column to the raster table, create a “most recent” table, and point IMJDBC at a view that does something like “…where raster_table.timestamp = most_recent.timestamp”. Does anybody know if that will work? The alternative would be to just use a file-based raster for the current day, and keep overwriting it.
Thanks, yet again, for your help. And just so you know, GeoServer enables a couple of applications that have pretty high political visibility and are making me look quite brilliant to my stakeholders* – so thanks to the GeoServer team!
rw
*Only you folks know the truth! Shhhhh! >;-}