An open meteorological alerting system: issues and solutions

  • Authors:
  • Ian Mathieson;Sandy Dance;Lin Padgham;Malcolm Gorman;Michael Winikoff

  • Affiliations:
  • RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC;Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, VIC;RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC;Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, VIC;RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC

  • Venue:
  • ACSC '04 Proceedings of the 27th Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 26
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper describes an experimental alerting system under development by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, initially targetted at (but not restricted to) the aviation sector. The system provides alert routing and filtering: for example pressure readings from automated weather stations may conflict with a local terminal aerodrome forecast, resulting in an alert being displayed to forecasters and other interested parties (such as airlines or individual aircraft).The multi-agent based design is inherently distributed and readily facilitates scalability and system evolution by simplifying integration of new services and components: for example, adding new types of data sources and/or alerts spanning multiple organisations and system platforms. Another key issue is robustness: the system must be able to adapt to failure of individual components.Further issues that arise concern more user-focussed alert provision: an aircraft may wish to be notified about alerts (or new alert types) that concern it, i.e. that take place in certain regions.In this paper we present the design of the system, discuss how the design addresses some of the issues, and outline our plans for supporting more flexible alert notification. Some early evaluation trials are currently underway.