Time and elevation support in GeoServer

Busy times in GeoSolutions and in GeoServer land! We just finished adding support for WMS time and elevation in GeoServer WMS on trunk, with plans to backport it to the stable 2.1.x series after the 2.1.1 release.

Configuring and using dimensions is performed, as tradition, by means an easy to use GUI. Just take a layer that has time information (or elevation), like this “storm tracks” layer:

Then switch to the new Dimensions tab and configure time support as follows:

Submit and voilà, you have your time enabled layer. Looking at the capabilities you can see GeoServer is automatically extracting the list of values for you (but you could also ask it to return just an interval, for brevity):

If you now ask GeoServer for the WMS layer you’ll get only one track, the last one, also known as the current data: 

But then again, you can ask for a month worth of data adding &TIME=2004-08-03/2004-09-03 to your request:

If you really want you also cherry pick the times you want to see, for example with &TIME=2000-08-03T16:00:00.000Z,2000-08-13T16:00:00.000Z,2000-08-17T10:00:00.000Z,2000-08-19T16:00:00.000Z:

For now we’re added time and elevation support, but we’re getting started with raster data and we should be landing that support soon too.

Interested in multidimensional data management advances? Let us know!

The GeoSolutions team,