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I am currently developing an application that requires to display raster images over a period of time (I'm looking how Hurrican Sandy progressed). While investigating, people have suggested that I could use a WCS service and view it on a viewer. We are currently using Google Maps API.

My question is, how can I publish these rasters in a WCS service (or relevant format) that can allow a viewer to loop through all images. Is there a standard practice everyone follows to accomplish this? I have knowledge using ArcGIS 9.3 Desktop/Server, ArcGIS Flex Viewer, and QGIS.

I appreciate any information regarding this topic or tutorials (haven't found any good ones yet). The images are geotiffs.

Thanks in advance!

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3 Answers 3

I suspect that you might actually want a WMS rather than a WCS (since you say raster images rather that raster data, and are currently using Google maps).

If all you want to do is display the images over time (using a slider or some such to control the time) then Openlayers and almost any WMS (GeoServer, MapServer, ArcServer etc.) will handle this.

See these openlayers example (which could use some UI love but shows the idea).

(The first example depends on this openlayers addin: https://github.com/mpriour/TimeManager_OpenLayers-Addin )

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You might look at this weather widget. I know they load separate layers for each image and play through those layers to get the effect you are talking about. Flex 2.1 - 3.0 weather widget on arcgis.com.
And for flex 3.1 weather widget on arcgis.com. +1 iant for WMS. That is what is used here.

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