Supplemental Information

Additional Information about the Sea-Level-Rise Data, Products and Tools Initiative

NOAA CSC will make the data available to researchers upon request and we will be providing access the map image service so the layers can be added to a GIS.

The NOAA Coastal Services Center’s strategy for distributing data contained in the SLR Viewer is to provide map services of the data and will expand to distribution of the actual data.  Currently, the viewer displays a total of 34 map services that contain the data necessary for each of the five tabs.  The map services can be accessed by external users and can be displayed in a variety of clients with both local and other remote data.

The SLR Viewer is accessing both dynamic and cached map services through the Center’s ESRI ArcGIS server implementation.  Specifically, services are being accessed through the ArcGIS Server REST (Representational State Transfer) API (Application Programming Interface), which is an interface for requesting data through URLs (Uniform Resource Locator).  The SLR, confidence, marsh, and flood frequency services have been cached, which allows for quick viewing of the data using the slider bar.  The vulnerability and point data are accessed through dynamic services, which allow for attributes of the data to be queried and displayed.

The SLR Viewer data will eventually be accessible via Open Geospatial Consortium-compliant (OGC, http://www.opengeospatial.org/) map services.  The OGC is a standards organization that develops and oversees “open” or non-proprietary services for accessing data.  The OGC services the Center will publish are Web Map Services (WMS), Web Feature Services (WFS), Web Coverage Services (WCS), and Keyhole Markup Language (KML).  Each of these service types is accessible from a variety of clients.

In addition to serving the data through map services, select data will be available for download via the NOAA Digital Coast website, by state, and will have Federal Geographic Data Committee-compliant metadata.