A distributed real-time hurricane wind analysis system

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division (HRD) has been producing real time analyses of tropical cyclone surface wind observations on an experimental basis. The primary product of these analyses is a streamline and isotach contour plot which contains data from available meteorological platforms, designed to aid hurricane specialists at the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The current application uses platform-dependent flat filesystems where data integrity is difficult to achieve. We envision an interactive system which will allow scientific users to select a storm, graphically examine and quality control the real-time or retrospective data collected during the time period of interest, analyze and archive the wind field, and create a variety of graphical analysis products or data sets derived from the wind field. The system software will be implemented with Java using distributed objects and an object-relational database. The client application will be capable of running on a workstation or a web browser to facilitate deployment as a hardware-independent, scientific application.