2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

Milestone 3. Develop an AWIPS II collaboration prototype
as part of the AWIPS II.
The NWS is investigating various approaches to meet
the collaboration requirements for AWIPS II. The latter
will allow real-time collaboration between weather
forecasters at different sites by allowing them to share
weather products, drawings and other data within the
AWIPS II environment.
The last year has seen the design of a distributed architecture
and the implementation of a basic system, to
allow collaboration as a plug-in for CAVE. The system
uses XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol)
messages between participating CAVE clients and Openfire
(an open-source server responsible for coordinating
the session) to exchange information about products each
client has loaded. Clients who are able to load products
directly are only passed metadata indicating what products
are to be loaded in order to remain synchronized
with the collaborative session, whereas those who cannot
load data are sent “screenshots” from connected clients
of the same data, thus minimizing bandwidth usage.
Screenshots are optimized for transmission and may be
compressed substantially or not, depending upon the
bandwidth requirements in that particular case.
Furthermore, the collaboration plug-in has been merged
with a version of the AWIPS II drawing tool plug-in
(Milestone 2) in order to enable collaborative drawing as
well. This allows session participants to draw or modify
Collaborative session: Each CAVE client joins the session
by enabling collaboration, which connects it to the
Openfire server. When a product is loaded on one client, or
a drawing created or modified, the resulting changes are
propogated to the other clients via XMPP messages to and
from the Openfire server.
cold fronts, weather symbols, etc. and have these changes
appear on other clients’ displays in near real-time. Development
of the collaboration tool will continue in the coming
year as NWS requirements evolve in order to provide
a fully functional production-quality end product.
NGDC-03SpaceWeather
FEDERAL LEAD: ERIC KIHN
CIRES LEAD: JUSTIN MABIE
NOAA Goal 4: Transportation
Project Goal: Assess the current state of the space environment
from the surface of the Sun to the upper atmosphere, use datadriven
physical models to construct a realistic and authoritative
gridded database of the space environment, and place that
description into its long-term climatological perspective.
Milestone 1. Add new features to the Space Physics Interactive
Data Resource (SPIDR), including the work flow system,
data dashboard, and collaboration on new web service interface
development with colleagues at the Russian Academy of
Sciences, Geophysical Center.
Several new features were added to SPIDR as part of this
effort. A downloadable desktop graphical application for
creating and executing workflows, based off of the Kepler
workflow system. The National Geophysical Data Center
(NGDC) bundle includes the derivative application,
CIRES Annual Report 2011 99