Compression and Relay Management System In Gridded Fx-net System Architecture and Use of Wavelet Compression

Abstract

The Compression and Relay Management System (CRMS) is the enabling technology for the Gridded FXNet system, a meteorological forecaster workstation being evaluated for operational use by fire weather prediction forecasters and operational control center forecasters.(Refer to Paper, S. Schranz ’06 AMS IIPS 6.8 – Gridded FX-Net Prototype Project for NIFC) The Gridded FX-Net system is an extended version of the National Weather Services’ Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), Bullock (1994.) What sets this system apart from AWIPS is the capability of serving multiple, remote, D2D clients. The CRMS developed for this project provides an intelligent ‘push’ system using existing technologies such as Local Data Manager (LDM) and Wavelet Compression. The LDM server was a key addition to the CRMS; however, modifications were made to all components of AWIPS. These changes were made to take advantage of the data handling, product generation and display manipulation capabilities of AWIPS. Wavelet-based data compression techniques to compress both satellite images and model grids are used in the CRMS to enhance data delivery to remote, Gridded FX-Net clients. These techniques have demonstrated the ability to significantly reduce the meteorological products file size, and therefore the transmission time of the products. To apply the wavelet data compression to CRMS, several adaptations and optimizations were made in order to meet the requirements of the operational environment.