• Products - the basic concept is a product. For example, a global chart showing 30 m wind and 2 m temperature with the outline of land areas and country boundaries would be a product.
  • Layers - a product is made from layers. For example, a layer could be the outline of land areas; a latitude/longitude grid or contours of meteorological variable such as precipitation.
  • Styles - a layer has styles and processing controls. For example, contour ranges and colours, and the accumulation period for precipitation.
  • Projections - you can visualise a map on a projection, which in our implementation is a combination of map projection and bounding box area. For example, Europe (the bounding box area) can be viewed using either a polar stereographic or cylindrical map projection. Note that products can have default projections.
  • Base time (BT) and validity time (VT) - exist for each gridded dataset, so also apply to each layer. Note that the time resolution of different layers can be different and can also change in time. For example the ENS timestep is longer after day 10 of the forecast. As a product is potentially a collection of layers, this means that the time availability of a given product is the intersection of all the time availabilities of all the layers that are part of the product. Simple!