The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) is planning to modernize the Climate and Water Archives. The goal is to create a paperless archive so that almost of all the operational atmospheric and water quantity monitoring data will be captured and quality controlled in near real-time so that quality data are made available to users in a timely fashion. In particular, the problem of handling huge data set such as Doppler Radar data including metadata will be discussed.

The MSC Operational data archives

The current MSC Climate and Water Archives (the National Archives System NAS) contain the long term operational climate, water, marine, lightning and air quality monitoring data.

There are a number of external pressures that prompt MSC to change her way of doing business. First, new data sources coming on-line such as Doppler Radar, AMDAR, and satellite data, the capacity of the current system cannot handle these additional stresses. Second, users require easy access to quality data in a near real-time fashion. The MSC data archives need to be modernized to accommodate these requirements.

With the advances in data compression, data warehousing and data mining techniques, the new MSC archives should be flexible so that it can take advantages of the latest advances in technology to create a sustainable, affordable and standardized logical system enabling users seamless access to the data holdings.

A prototype of the national long-term Doppler Radar archives will be presented.