Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) is a complex data assimilation and distribution system developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Office of Atmospheric Research with many innovative aspects including: ingesting, integrating, processing for quality control and transmitting NOAA and non-NOAA surface observations across the country and ocean-based, many types of upper air soundings including balloon-borne and aircraft, and remote sensing from both ground-based and satellite systems. It has reached a point where it can now be transferred from research into an operational environment under NOAA Policy on Transition of Research to Operations (NAO 216-105, dated May 31, 2005). NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) plans to transition MADIS to the NWS's Telecommunications Operations Center (TOC) in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The MADIS system is organized into a number of subsystems and each subsystem processes a specific data type. Within the conceptual architecture for the MADIS Transition System, each subsystem is represented as a “data processing thread” which performs an end-to-end processing of a specific dataset. Each data processing thread consists of ingest, decoding, Data-processing, Quality control, Data storage, Monitoring, and data delivery modules.

In this paper we are presenting a data processing threads called temperature radiance and sounding data processing subsystem. The MADIS system receives NOAA Polar Orbital Environmental Satellites (POES) satellite radiance and sounding data through TOC. The MADIS satellite dataset consists of multiple products from different providers which are integrated into a single dataset. In this paper we also discuss the use of virtualization technology for the migration of the current code base from the existing hardware to new blade architecture. Blade servers consolidate multiple servers and associated resources (e.g. storage and networking equipment) into single chassis managed by a single interface. Virtualization makes a single or multiple physical resources, such as server, an operating system, an application, or storage device to function as a single logical resource or as multiple logical resources.

Virtualization is used to create a simulated computer environment, a virtual machine for its guest software. The guest software is often itself a complete operating system (OS). The guest operating systems can be 32-bit on a 64-bit machine which makes the system architecture independent. This feature eases the migration of the legacy code into new architecture with minimal changes. Virtual machine technology also allows a single hardware platform to host multiple operating systems and applications, reducing the number of physical servers required while maximizing the utilization of each server. This results in fewer wasted CPU cycles, and a reduction in processors which brings power savings, management simplification, as well as enhanced security. Thus, we demonstrate the use virtualization to migrate the current implementation of the satellite radiance and sounding data thread from a 32-bit environment to the 64-bit blade architecture.