Compression and Relay Management System in Gridded FX-Net, System Architecture and Use of Wavelet Compression

Compression and Relay Management System (CRMS) is the enabling technology of Gridded FX-Net, a meteorological forecaster workstation being evaluated for operational use by fire weather prediction forecasters and operational control center forecasters. The Gridded FX-Net system is an extended version of the National Weather Services' AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System). What sets this system apart from the AWIPS system is the capability of serving multiple, remote, D2D clients. The CRMS developed for this project provides an intelligent ‘push' system using existing technologies such as LDM and Wavelet Compression.

The LDM server was a key addition to the CRMS; however, modifications were made to all components of the AWIPS system. Data server, file (applications) server and changed to the D2D client were developed to take advantage of the data handling, product generation and display manipulation of the AWIPS software.

Wavelet-based data compression techniques to compress both satellite images and model grids are used in the CRMS to enhance the data delivery to remote Gridded FX-Net clients. These techniques have demonstrated their abilities to significantly reduce the meteorological products file size, and therefore the transmission time of the products. To apply the wavelet data compression to CRMS, several adaptations and optimizations were made in order to meet the requirements of the operational environment.

The presentation will provide a full description of the technology developed to field this extended system.