Technical Specifications

Integration and Scalability

We can assist you with setting up the operational environment or Visual Weather can adopt to your existing structure seamlessly.

Perfectly scalable architecture

Single laptop or multiple servers in high-availability cluster? You can have the solution that is the best fit for your needs. And if you wanted to extend the capabilities and need a software that follows the size of your office, a client-server architecture of Visual Weather is exact match for you. Common operational schemes include:

  • Client/server architecture – server shares its database and presets with individual client desktops or laptops. Servers can be clustered for high availability (HA) or load balancing. User profiles can be accessed from any client.
  • Remote desktop protocols – users connecting via Citrix or other RDP stacks
  • Standalone workstation – everything running on one PC or laptop

System compatibility

Visual Weather can run on a variety of operational systems:

  • Servers and stand-alone systems: Linux, Solaris®, Unix
  • Client workstation: Linux, Microsoft® Windows®, Solaris®, Unix

Diversity of Input and Output

Visual Weather is very flexible in the reception and transmission of data. It is able to receive, store and process various data types from a wide range of data sources and produce output in multiple formats and deliver it in multiple ways

Data Formats

  • Surface synoptic data: FM-12 SYNOP, FM-13 SHIP, FM-14 MOBIL, FM-18 BUOY, SYNOP in FM-94 BUFR
  • Upper-air data: FM-35 TEMP, FM-36 TEMP SHIP, FM-37 TEMP MOBIL, FM-38 TEMP DROP, FM-32 PILOT, FM-33 PILOT SHIP, FM-34 PILOT MOBIL, FM-42 AMDAR, AIREP, TEMP, PILOT and AMDAR in FM-94 BUFR
  • Aeronautical data: FM-15 METAR, FM-16 SPECI, FM-51 TAF, FM-42 AMDAR, AIREP
  • Climatological data: FM-71 CLIMAT, FM-72 CLIMAT SHIP, FM-75 CLIMAT TEMP, FM-76 CLIMAT TEMP SHIP, INTER
  • Model data: FM-92 GRIB (GME-DWD, LME-DWD, HRM-DWD, UK, Washington, ECMWF, Arpege/Aladin, ETA, MM5-NCAR, RAMS, WAVE (ECMWF, UK, GKSS, …) and other)
  • Satellite imagery: FM-92 GRIB, PIF & XPIF (VCS), HDF5 &l MEOS HDF5 (Kongsberg; European MSG NWCSAF Nowcasting), GeoTIFF (SeaSpace TeraScan), third-party receivers for MeteoSat 2nd Generation (MSG), MeteoSat, NOAA, FengYun, GOES, NWCSAF, MPEF, etc.
  • Radar imagery including Doppler products: FM-94 BUFR (WMO standard, OPERA standard, EEC/DRS, Gematronik), FM-92 GRIB (EEC/DRS, various systems), GeoTIFF, SRD2, third-party radars (Gematronik, Gamic, CERAD, etc.)
  • Lightning data: FM-82 SFLOC, EUCLID, SAFIR, other third-party
  • Significant weather charts: FM-94 BUFR (Bracknell & Washington), SatRep (ZAMG)
  • Nowcasting: HDF5 (European MSG NWCSAF Nowcasting project), MPEF, PIF & XPIF (VCS), GRIB, CSV, other third-party
  • Wind profilers
  • FAX T4 charts
  • … and many more

Spatial Databases

  • Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database
  • GTOPO30 high-precision world-wide digital elevation model
  • ETOPO1 world-wide digital bathymetry model
  • High-resolution vector local topography exported from GIS software

Handling large data volumes

Visual Weather include various technologies that ensure that the meteorological services are able to cope with the expanding volume of meteorological data (e.g. high-resolution model data, multi-member ensemble models or satellite data):

  • Hybrid Client technology allows seamless horizontal scaling and cascading of server systems working effectively also over WAN (Wide Area Networks).
  • Super Cache infrastructure makes use of disk storage and memory mapping to maximise space for caching of products to speed up their processing.
  • In conjunction with IBL Open Weather the Gridded Elastic Database provides highest level of scalability in processing of large volumes of meteorological data making use the Cloud.

Connection Types

  • GTS Message Switching Systems
  • SADIS, RETIM, DWDSAT, ISCS, EumetCast, WIFS, RETIM, RETIM2000
  • TCP/IP WMO stream protocol and asynchronous channels
  • File-transfer (FTP, SCP, SFTP, HTTP, Cloud Amazon AWS S3)

Output Formats

  • Images in bitmap formats: JPG, T4, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, XPM, Scalable Vector Graphics SVG, or Adobe® Portable Document Format PDF
  • Tabular Information in CSV, HTML or PDF
  • Text Output in Plain Text, HTML, PDF

Output Delivery

  • E-mail (automatic and manual)
  • Printer including large-scale plotters(automatic and manual)
  • GTS WMO messages
  • File-delivery to specified folders
  • FAX (automatic and manual)