The weather service has already seen a return on its $250,000 investment in ACNM, Chambers says. Aside from the database server savings, the simulation tool also helped the NWS determine the bandwidth it needed for a new radar system. ACNM found the radar system requires DS-3 circuits rather than additional T1 lines, which saved the agency millions of dollars in unnecessary T1 costs.
And the weather service may be consulting ACNM again soon, this time to help solve backup problems with the IFPS Red Hat Linux servers at its 122 forecasting sites. When one of these servers crashes, weather data is automatically mirrored to the central NCF server, which then acts as a backup. Chambers says the NWS needs each server to be able to transmit its configuration file back to the central server within 30 minutes, and then to have its files available within 10 minutes so forecasts aren't missed. That won't be easy. "How are we going to get a 20-MB file over this network from each site within a half an hour?" Chambers wonders. The weather service will simulate compressing the configuration files over ACNM. That way, NWS can determine how fast the files would travel using a new compression technique developed for meteorological data.
Changes Like the Weather
The IFPS application uses Esri ArcGIS' geographical information system package for customizing forecasts down to neighborhood streets, as well as its PNG (portable network graphics) and text-based displays of the weather data stored in the database. It generates the PNG files on the weather service's intranet server, and later this year, those graphics will be available on the weather service's public Web site. IFPS and NDFD ride atop the NWS' IP-frame relay WAN, the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System network.
Although the NWS typically develops much of its own code, the agency's recent $10 million Red Hat 7.3 Linux makeover is a sign of the times: NWS' move from Unix to Linux is nearly complete, and now it's looking at other open-source code like MySQL for its database archive at the NCF. That doesn't mean it will throw away any of its custom-built software for the database, Chambers says.
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