Wayland, MA., USA, 9 October 2009. Meteo France, the UK Met Office, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) jointly announce that the 2nd Workshop on the Use of GIS/OGC Standards in Meteorology will be held at the Conference International Centre at Meteo-France, Toulouse, France, from 23-25 November 2009. See http://www.meteo.fr/cic/meetings/gis-ogc/ for details.

The aims of this workshop are to review applications of OGC and other standard Web services, encodings, and analytical methodologies across the meteorology community; discuss relationships between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and OGC; and define a roadmap for further activities of the OGC Meteorology & Oceanography Domain Working Group. This working group provides an open forum on meteorological and oceanographic systems interoperability and a formal process for developing international consensus standards that may be submitted to the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) for adoption.

The workshop will consist of presentations, open discussions, working groups and plenary sessions. The deadline for registering is 12 November 2009. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 2 November 2009.

David Arctur, Director of Interoperability Programs at OGC said, “The successful 2008 workshop hosted by ECMWF and the UK Met Office showed many implementations of WMS for meteorology, which also improves the usability of weather information in fields such as aviation, transportation and disaster management. The upcoming workshop will highlight recent progress in OGC standards and highlight the upcoming Phase 7 OGC Web Services testbed activity (OWS-7).”

The Met Office (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/) and Météo-France (http://france.meteofrance.com/) are the UK's and France's National Weather Services. They are among the world's leading weather forecast centres and main contributors to the United Nations University Global Environment Information Centre (GEIC).

The European Centre for Medium range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) (http : //www.ecmwf.int/) is an international European organization located in Reading, UK. It is the world's leading centre for Medium Range Forecast.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 380 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.