Marta Systems’ Yosemiteä meteorological software suite is the solution when you need to quickly and accurately forecast, or create and provide customized weather products to your end users – from the acquisition of raw data and analysis, to the automatic generation of web content tailored to your customer’s requirements.
The Yosemite software suite is used to receive, store and process raw weather data and generate completed weather graphic and text products for the meteorologist. These completed weather products may be published automatically for use on a web site.
Software Suite Components
A complete Yosemite software suite consists of, at minimum, these software modules:
- Marta Weather Service – always running, this module performs all background processing including data reception, product generation and web publishing
- Marta Watchdog Service – always running, this module is responsible for software updates and fail-safe monitoring of the system
- Yosemite Viewer – this interactive graphics program is used by the meteorologist to create and view weather products, and to perform analysis
- Marta Alarm Client – this module is a network enabled alarm module that can reside on any machine to receive and acknowledge alarm conditions
Client - Server Architecture
Although Yosemiteä software modules may be loaded on a single physical machine, the software operates in a client-server mode, where the Marta Weather Service assumes the “server” role, and the Yosemiteä Viewer acts as the “client”.
In a small office environment, or with limited data sets, users often configure Yosemiteä on a single machine.
In a larger operation, or when processing large amounts of data, it is usually better to dedicate a computer for the service functions. One or more Yosemiteä Viewers can be utilized simultaneously on various workstations by the meteorologists.
Another advantage of this architecture is scalability. Multiple servers can be deployed, splitting the processing load as many times as necessary to achieve your goals. Configurations that support load sharing and redundancy are also available.
Yosemiteä Viewer
Utilizing 24-bit color plus an 8-bit Alpha transparency channel allows high resolution map backgrounds to be combined with as many layers of weather data as desired, producing broadcast quality graphic output.
Products are created using a friendly point and click GUI and are not based on elaborate programming scripts. Yosemiteä was designed for meteorologist end users, not UNIX programmers. Created products may be saved as favorites in the familiar browser-like interface, and are updated continuously as new data are received. Product favorites can be organized into folders to simplify access.
Products can be automatically published in Macromedia Flash for export and viewed as a time lapsed movie loop showing movement of radar echoes, satellite imagery, station data (including buoys, ships and aircraft) and gridded data parameters.
The meteorologist can specify any area of interest (AOI) from 12 different world map projections (Mercator, Lambert, Gall, Polar Stereo, Plate-Carree, Sanson, etc.) and select a pleasing color background from a variety of styles included with the software.
Any meteorological data available within the AOI can be selected, and with a single click, added to the image in layers, each with independent color palette, threshold level, and transparency control. For analysis, layers can be easily selected on and off and arranged in any order.
The assortment of included color map backgrounds can be altered directly in PhotoShop. A built-in Geographic Information system (GIS) contains well over 100 element types covering the entire globe, including land and bathymetric contours and is fully expandable to meet changing requirements. User generated backgrounds can be imported, and optional high resolution backgrounds are also available. Optional space derived backgrounds with resolutions of 1 kilometer down to .68 meters may be utilized.
A complete set of drawing tools including weather symbols, front lines, fill shapes and text with full font control are included for annotation.
The built-in Forecaster Toolkit contains Vertical Cross Section from GRIB, Skew-t from UpperAir or GRIB with ducting, hazards (icing, hail, turbulence, thunderstorm probability, helicity, contrails, etc.) hodographs, and meteograms. GRIB, upper air, and surface data parameters can be displayed as contours with or without gradient or step shading. Readouts of data values, including temperature, pressure, etc., at the latitude and longitude of the cursor are always provided. SIGMET, AIRMET, Watches and Warnings, ship tracks, ship and buoy observations, station and upper air plots and other data are decoded into drawing elements on receipt and can be overlaid as layers in a graphic product.
Individual min/max thresholds may be preset for each favorite, and may include wind speed, visibility, temperature, RH, heat index, wind chill, and thunderstorm presence.
All products can be zoomed and panned to examine the finest detail.
Yosemiteä can generate dynamic web content that contains Macromedia Flash elements. This dynamic use of Flash by Yosemiteä keeps the page file size to a minimum, while providing sound and motion capabilities that enhance the user’s experience.
ASOS-like Flash movies are generated from ordinary Metars and update automatically upon receipt of new data. Several different ASOS “skins” are available to choose from to match your customized website style and are user sizable.
The Viewer’s built-in product authoring tool connects to the Service Module internally if on the same computer, or through your LAN, the internet or your private network. Any number of users may connect to a Yosemiteä Service Module and have access to all products being generated on the system.
Yosemiteä Alarm