The Design and Implementation of Provincial Meteorological Information Sharing System

Meteorological information plays the fundamental role in weather forecast and meteorological service. With the rapid development of meteorological observing system and numerical weather prediction model in the last decade, the types and amount of the meteorological information, including observation data and forecast products, increases enormously. The traditional meteorological information management and sharing system can not fully meet the requirements of meteorological operation and service. To address the growing demand of meteorological operation and service, a new model of provincial meteorological information management and sharing system is proposed. The model is mainly made up of two parts: The relational database and the message-oriented middleware.The database manages integrated meteorological information from both observation and model outputs. Due to different data encoding mechanism, meteorological information is divided into two categories. The first category is decoded to meteorological element data and stored in two-dimensional data tables of the database. The other one is stored in a special storage area in file form and its file index table is managed by the database. So the database can provide the meteorological information sharing service in both file-level and element-level.The middleware provides flexible and high-performance access to the database. It is compatible with a variety of development environment and programming languages. The middleware also takes full advantage of indexes in the database, and protects the database by automatically generating and submitting SQL statements for the application software. The advantages of the meteorological information sharing system are as follows: The system manages a mass amount of meteorological data in an intensive way. The meteorological information in the database is retrieved exactly and efficiently by utilizing some technologies, such as metadata. The middleware of the system implements a more open, more efficient and safer access to the database.The meteorological information management and sharing system in Sichuan Province is developed in accordance with the model. The Oracle 10g is installed as the core database and IBM Websphere MQ, a message-oriented middleware with further developed library, is used as the access interface to the database. A series of applications developed upon the sharing system have been put into operation in recent years all over the Province, and have played extremely important roles in weather forecasting and meteorological service, especially in flood seasons service and emergency service.In practice, it's proved that the model of provincial meteorological information management and sharing system not only improves the internal quality of meteorological information management, but also the meteorological information sharing service in all round way. The model can meet the requirements to manage and share meteorological information for the provincial meteorological service. Therefore, this model can be used as a reference in designing of the provincial meteorological information management and sharing system.