The Horace workstation meteorological visualisation and production system at the UKMO is maturing into a vital tool for the operational forecaster. The working practices in the National Meteorological Centre (NMC) at Bracknell and at other key sites have altered significantly following the introduction of new, more-integrated, production facilities.
These include the creation and amalgamation of virtually any on-screen graphic and text objects into a formal 'product', their automatic conversion into a variety of output formats, and their dissemination to the customers. The flexible creation facilities provided by the Horace visualisation tools, the text editor and it's macro language, the on-screen analysis (the subject of an associated paper from Rob Acker), the NWP field modification and the aviation significant weather options, form the basis of the production process.
We must ensure we keep faith with our existing users by supporting, improving-on and enhancing existing facilities, and by proving the end-to-end compliance of the system and software through Year 2000. New development is currently focusing on the visualisation and production facilities required to handle site-specific forecasts, atmospheric pollution, and oceanographic observations/model output/variables. In the longer term we are faced with a wealth of technical options.
This paper will highlight the progress, problems etc. since the last IIPS meeting, consider the impact of proving Year 2000 compliance, and look at the current plans and options for the next few years.