Development of an Advanced System of Integration and Georeferenciation of Meteorological Information (SIGMA)

Current forecasters' activities involve the need of dealing with a big amount of data coming from different sources: radar networks, lightning, surface data, or NW models. In the last year SMC in collaboration with GRAHI-UPC has developed a software package aiming to integrate into a system of visualization different meteorological data to improve forecasters tasks. The SIGMA software has been designed to work with a conceptual multi-layer temporal structure that enables an easy integration of several types of data with different temporal and spatial resolution. SIGMA is basically focused on real time animation and inspection of meteorological data, enabling with simple actions to manipulate layers properties (position, transparency, etc.) and animation resolution (selecting which type of data conducts the animation time step). Current SIGMA version is focused on the visualization of data from meteorological radar, satellite (Metosat data), lightning, NW models and topographic information (background topographic maps and georeferenced vectorial information). Additionally a system of profiles user has been developed to facilitate the configuration of the types of data and layers to be loaded in the application as a function of the clients' characteristics. The work will give a description of the methodology followed in the design of the application with several examples of the capabilities of the tool and the analysis of the users experience with the software with real time data.