Vista Manifest
Visualizations of Climate Forecasting Open Data
Vista Manifest is a data driven website for educational purposes. It's an Open Source website based on visualizations of Open Datasets.
Scientific Weather and Climate data has generally been available on the web as Open Datasets for some time now. Such data is often in a technical file format called NetCDF and in a certain convention referred to as CF Convention. Weather and Climate Forecasting websites that publish NetCDF CF datasets, whilst very important information, possibly unfortunately to-date, don't make this data available in a super basic easy way to digest in a modern, mobile-friendly, browser. Vista Manifest is a simple technical interface, between these publicly available Open Datasets and your browser. This may simply involve making the data accessible in a more intuitive way and adding some improved styling context to the renderings of these publicly available raw datasets and you. Vista Manifest essentially uses 100% client side rendering to display your NetCDF data - there is essentially no back-end data processing done as part of these visualizations. Some of the more complex or animated visualizations here may take a few seconds to load - but keep in mind you are looking at renderings from the real data source. Whether that be a live, near live, or archived dataset. There is no latency introduced by any back-end processing. Sometimes the generation of the visualizations takes a few seconds. It's as simple as that. If you would like further information or have some suggestions, please see the Get Involved page.
If your datasets are truly Open Data - then ideally you are serving your NetCDF files over https with CORS headers (cross origin resource sharing http headers). This would enable direct consumption of your NetCDF resources in an end-user browser. If your web, or THREDDS TDS, server isn't serving your files with CORS headers, then Vista Manifest may have had to implement a simple proxy to fetch your resources for consumption by a third party end user (a users web browser). Setting up such a proxy is just a workaround and only necessary if your web server lacks CORS headers. Which is less than ideal as is completely unnecessary. As a publisher, custodian, or server admin, of Open Data, please ensure your files are served over https with http CORS headers (this applies whether your files are served via http or using a THREDDS server). Unfortunately, to date (as of Dec 2024), a large number of public THREDDS servers don't have these vital CORS headers - and for several visualizations on this website, have necessitated the need to proxy upstream THREDDS server responses. If you have recently updated your servers to include these vital CORS headers - please inform us on the Contact Us page so we can remove our proxy relaying your data.