CryoLand - The GMES Service for Snow and Land Ice

CryoLand Online Data Access Demonstration:

Online Data Access via:

Interactive Map-Tool (Optimized for Firefox & Chromium; IE has problems with style, some javascript code and only donwloads the first file of a selected time-series, instead all files).

The CryoLand Interactive Map-Tool is not intended to act as an analysis tool for Snow and Land-Ice products, but to demonstrate the advantages of the combined utilization of a Viewing Service ( Web Mapping Service [ WMS ] ) and a Downloading Service ( Web Coverage Service [ WCS ] ), both based on the International standards defined by OGC .

While WMS represents an already widely known and accepted concept, but delivers only portrayals of the data ( e.g. jpeg pictures ), WCS allows the direct access to the actual datasets in its original context, which enables the user to fully exploit and analyze the received datasets in the user's preferred environment ( e.g. GIS, Decision Support Environment, etc. ).

CryoLand implements the recent WCS 2.0 standard and in addition applies the current EO*‑Application Profile for WCS, utilizing the OpenSource EOxServer software stack.
This combination allows the user to select the "Area of Interest" ( AOI ) and the "Time of Interest" ( TOI ) to exactly determine and access ( download ) the subset, of a potentially large Dataset-Series ( e.g. a Time Series ), the user is interested in. These features not only reduce the overall amount of data-transfered but provide the user only with the data the user is really interested in.

The access to the CryoLand offered Dataset-Series can be performed using either the CryoLand Interactive Map-Tool or, as it is true for all OGC Services, using general HTTP-KVP requests as shown in the Example section provided below.

Due to the large number of datasets offered by CryoLand, baseline WMS requests are not supported anymore, since e.g. a WMS-GetCapabilities Response exceeds any reasonable size (>16MB) and creation time (~20min) for the offered products (~20.000 products). This change, to support only EO-WMS & EO-WCS, implies that only DatasetSeries (often called Collections) are now listed in the GetCapabilities response.

The CryoLand Interactive Map-Tool, however, is intended as a demonstration and to offer you a comfortable way to explore the convenient data access features available when utilizing the combination of WCS 2.0/EO‑WCS.

* EO = Earth Observation

Description, EO-WCS and EO-WMS Request Examples

This section provides some general information about the available service requests and their use for EO-WMS and EO-WCS.

It is mainly targeted to expert users and developers who want/need to understand/implement HTTP-KVP request.
Furthermore, it provides basic Examples and some information on how to correctly construct URLs to access the CryoLand offered datasets using such HTTP-KVP requests.