The China National Weather Forecast Platform: SGI MICAPS

SGI MICAPS is the most important working platform in China National Meteorological Center(NMC) for everyday use, written by C++, deployed on SGI graphics workstations. Almost all kinds of regular meteorological data such as model grid data, observation data, satellite image, radar data, geographic data can be viewed on the platform in real time. Besides, ensemble forecast module is newly integrated so that ensemble forecast data and multi-model ensemble forecast data can be visualized in several kinds of forms. A lot of utility tools are integrated for analyzing weather system and making forecast. Multi-domains are supported by the platform, graphics layers can be viewed in one or more client windows. Users may select and scroll one or more graphics layers, and smoothly zoom or navigate in global range. The system is the cross-platform version of MICAPS, with just a few modification, the system can be compiled and deployed on other operating systems such as Linux, Mac Os.