Wednesday, 23 January 2008: 11:15 AM
An integrated forecast production system
206 (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) have recently migrate their national forecast production system to a more flexible and efficient data format capable of fulfilling a wider collection of meteorological needs. The use of an Interactive Expert System called SCRIBE is at the heart of this change. Numerical and statistical models data are process by the SCRIBE system to extract the meteorological events for a suite of Canadian forecast regions. In each forecast office, operational forecasters can analyse the SCRIBE guidance and make modification to the weather elements. SCRIBE is also capable of ingesting hourly surface, radar and lightning observations and nowcasting model data to present an hourly nowcasting guidance. The forecasts that are than issued are in a digital format called METEOCODE, which drives the production of a multitude of different products in both official langages for many users. Among these users we can mention the MSC official web site, Regional and National specialysed users and many external clients who can use the official forecast in an XML format. Currently the system operates for the Canadian Public Forecast program. A Marine SCRIBE version for marine forecasts will be in service this fall to support the Marine Forecast Program. This new version will be able to produce all Marine forecasts and warnings for the Canadian lakes and oceans. The forecast period which currently covers the first five days, will be extended to 10 days next Winter. This pilot project will utilized the Canadian Ensemble Prediction System to which a clustering algorithem will be apply (Bourgouin P., Developing operational uses of the Canadian ensemble prediction system). The integration of additional data to the system is currentely under development to support the Air Quality Forecast Program, the Canadian Agriculture and the 2010 Winter Olympics Games in Vancouver. In this session a description of the SCRIBE system will be presented and how it integrates in the Canadian Forecast production system.
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