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 year 2011, and it implements the capability of climate data retrieval, multi-visualization, diagnosis and statistics, products generation. CIPAS provides an integrated data environment that contains meteorological surface observation data, indexes data, reanalysis data and climate model data with long time serial. 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 with a light client are designed for CIPAS, which allows procedures with massive computing and backend production generation can be run in the Server end. The component and plugin design patterns are used to implement the core components of CIPAS client. The core components of the CIPAS mainly cover the data accessing, graphic rendering, climate diagnosis and analysis, page layout, and settings, and these components can be constructed into the basic operational features and the tool box of climate analysis as well, for instance, EOF,SVD,ACC,and also can be used to encapsulate APIs for extension application. The construction principle, general system framework, main features and 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 renderer engine and related algorithms, production automatic generation, distributed and asynchronous communication mechanism, crossing platform, development API, and plug-in for toolbox. Data management discusses the data type, the accessing API and data exchange format. The graphic renderer engine involves OpenGL implementation. Production generation uses workflow engine for automation and customization. Distributed communication uses ICE open source component to avoid different client and server deployment environment. Crossing platform adopts C++ and JAVA transplantable and compliable development language. 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 by using multi-tool in toolbox, and another case explains how to get the monthly station forecast production both with graphic and text format by using several inactive tools. The pilot using of the current system for the national and provincial operation offices presents that the CIPAS meets the basic operational requirement and shows the operation and development prospect of the CIPAS features. In conclusion, it proposes some advance directions for the further development of CIPAS. Key words: climate monitoring & prediction; human–computer interaction (HCI); data management; statistics & diagnosis analysis.