Designing and Implementation of Climate Interactive Plotting and Analysis System

Climate Interactive Plotting and Analysis System (CIPAS) is an ongoing application project for the modern climate monitoring, diagnosis and prediction operation launched by China Meteorological Administration since 2011, which has enhanced the capability of climate data retrieval, multi-visualization, diagnosis, statistics, and products generation. CIPAS provides an integrated data environment that contains meteorological surface observations, index data, reanalysis data and numerical forecast products with long time series. The data environment also implements the simple and unified application program interface (API) with parameters in data property of element, level, time, spatial region, and data type and so on. A distributed architecture with multi-ties and a light client are designed for CIPAS, which allows procedures with massive computing and backend production generation to run on the server. The component and plugin design patterns are used to implement the core components of CIPAS client. The CIPAS core components mainly consist of data accessing, graphic rendering, climate diagnosis and analysis, page layout, setting, and these components can be constructed into the basic operational features and the tool box of climate analysis as well, for instance, EOF, SVD and so on. Also, it can be used to encapsulate APIs for extension application. The construction principle, general system framework, main features, deployment and workflow of CIPAS are discussed in detail. Meanwhile, some key issues involving the implementation of the CIPAS are further discussed, such as data management, graphic rendering engine and related algorithms, production automatic generation, distributed and asynchronous communication mechanism, crossing platform, development API, and plug-in for toolbox. The data type, the accessing API and data exchange format are introduced in data management section. The graphic renderer engine involves OpenGL implementation. Production generation uses workflow engine for automation and customization. Distributed communication is implemented using ICE open source component to avoid different client and server deployment environment. C++ and JAVA language is adopted to ensure crossing platform compatibility. Plug-in implementation covers the component and interface technique. In terms of operation application, two typical operation scenarios are introduced in detail. One case focuses on how to get the given climate diagnosis result using multi-tool in toolbox, and the other case explains how to get the monthly station forecast production both with graphic and text format by using several interactive tools. The pilot using of the current system for the national and provincial operation offices present that CIPAS meets the basic operational requirement and shows the operation and development prospect of CIPAS features. Some advancing directions are also proposed for the further development of CIPAS.