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MetWise Net Brings It All Together |
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The Internet is an important resource for weather information. A standard web browser provides access to satellite imagery, forecast models, radar and observations but the data is scattered all over the Internet. MetWise Net puts all the data and information into one location—the user's computer—with a unique, easy-to-use graphical user interface. The MetWise Net client can load and overlay products of various types and interact with that information. |
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The Interface is Slick and Quick |
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The MetWise Net interface permits a user to display and rapidly switch between five different product windows. The interface uses standard pull-down menus, a primary graphics window and four product storage windows. Once the user loads a product it can be moved to a storage window with one mouse click for quick retrieval. With minimal effort users can adjust the system to display customized scales, add supplementary observational data, and display special customer-oriented forecast models in combination with the existing suites of National Weather Service products.
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This screen shot of the MetWise Net graphical user interface shows the basic layout, consisting of one main product window (large window) and four storage windows (small windows on the left). In this example, a composite reflectivity radar image from the Houston, Texas NEXRAD site is displayed in the main product window. From top to bottom, the four storage windows contain an eastern US water vapor satellite image, western US radar mosaic, western US visible satellite image and a Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) 500 mb wind speed image. |
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How it Works |
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MetWise Net is a request-based, client-server system operating as an extension of ENSCO's MetWise Enterprise multi-workstation weather display and analysis system. The ENSCO MetWise server is primarily responsible for time matching of products and for creation and delivery of the product files. The MetWise Net client runs as a Java application on a Windows PC, Mac or Linux. After retrieving user-requested products from the MetWise server via an Internet connection, it allows a user to locally interact with the information. Connections to the server are only maintained during the request and retrieval of products. MetWise Net uses a wavelet transform to compress model and satellite imagery for optimum delivery speeds, even on a low-bandwidth 56 Kbps modem. The application of this relatively new compression technique is critical to the success of delivering very large-size imagery via the Internet in a reasonable amount
of time. The flexibility of MetWise Net makes it a very popular weather display system
for professional meteorologists, researchers, teachers, storm chasers and any
weather enthusiast. |
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