Horace - The expanding role of wake-up calls

The functionality of the Horace meteorological workstation system developed by the United Kingdom Met Office (UKMO) continues to increase. It is now a mature visualisation and production tool in operational use in the National Meteorological Centre (NMC), Bracknell, at the HQ of RAF Strike Command (HQSTC) at High Wycombe, at the Royal Navy Fleet Weather and Oceanography Centre (FWOC) at Northwood, and at the HQ of the United States Airforce in Europe (USAFE) in Sembach, Germany. A further system has also been implemented for the Thailand Meteorological Department in Bangkok.

This paper will give an update of the Horace system and provide an overview of the range of facilities, both available and planned. In particular it will concentrate on the increasing use of MetWatch, Horace's attention-getter application. Its function is to monitor the arrival and/or contents of any incoming data (e.g. observations, NWP, imagery…) then to issue an alert or automatically perform a background task.

MetWatch can be used to carry out a variety of tasks from the mundane - for example, create a grid-point field of vorticity when the NWP wind fields have been received from the latest model run - to the esoteric - for example, create a first-guess warning message if the model is predicting snow near a given airport.