Building a portal for climate data—Mapping automation, visualization, and dissemination

Abstract

Summary This article discusses the technologies and implementation of a climate data portal. This portal provides researchers and community stakeholders access to climatological data and resources, currently focusing on the state of Hawai'i. The portal provides interactive access to and visualization of hosted historical and near‐real‐time gridded maps and aggregated sensor station observational data. Climate data (currently precipitation and temperature) from sensor stations are collected, quality controlled, and processed daily to produce high‐resolution gridded maps of climate data. A publicly available web application allows users to navigate the available data and visualize the produced gridded data products and sensor stations data on an interactive map element, view information about the sensor stations used to produce a given map, and generate time series from sensor station data. The portal can also generate packages of data to export from the application. The portal is designed to host and disseminate any climatological variables that can be processed into a set of observational data and gridded value maps. The established workflow and automation procedure is generally extensible to additional variables and will be used similarly to expand the scope of the portal.