Weather forecasting	Platform-neutral Contour, color, vector field and standards maps available

Notwithstanding the huge amount of data produced, LAM numerical output must be easily and quickly represented graphically in order to give meteorologists the possibility to analyze the data as soon as possible. The standard graphical representations used by meteorologists are contour maps, color maps and cross sections, i.e., representations, with contour lines of vertical "slices" of the atmosphere. The forecasted represented parameters are, typically, precipitation, temperature, pressure, cloudiness, wind vectors, etc.

FINSIEL is Italy's principal information technology company. It has been operating since 1987 in the field of meteorology, paying particular attention to meteorology for agriculture, the environment and protection against natural disasters. FINSIEL operates mainly with national and local public administrations; it created the National Agrometeorological Service for the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, the Agrometeorological Service of the Puglia Region and, with other companies, the Agrometeorological Service of the Sardinia Region. Furthermore, FINSIEL worked to create the Hydro-Meteorological Centre of the Liguria Region with the Physics Department at the University of Genoa.

For its meteorological applications, FINSIEL implemented a graphical user interface, denoted MODELMap, using PV-WAVE for managing the elaborations and the numerical output of a LAM.

PV-WAVE was chosen by FINSIEL for this application for several reasons. It guarantees a standard environment, either in UNIX^® or Windows^® NT, whose applications are easily portable from one platform to another. Furthermore, PV-WAVE offers some standard functions suitable for the representation of meteorological fields: contour maps together with color maps (black-and-white and color-filled maps), vector field maps, 16 standard mapping projections plus the ability to accept user-defined projections. In particular, its "movie" utility is useful for showing the time evolution of the meteorological conditions. PV-WAVE offers a fourth-generation language for creating a graphical user interface as a X-windows application, with icons, buttons, etc.

FINSIEL's MODELMap's main functions are definition of the parameters for the execution of the LAM; monitoring of the LAM's execution, with the visualization of the error log; monitoring of the postprocessing of the LAM's output in order to obtain an elaboration of the forecasted parameters (i.e., total precipitation over a two-day period rather than over a three-hour period); and quick and easy production of graphical output on screen, printer or file, of the forecasted meteorological field. In particular it may produce

• contour and filled maps,
• vector field maps (for wind) and
• animation of the output.

This last function is quite attractive and gives visual proof of the power of PV-WAVE -- visualization of the territorial data (orography, land-sea-mask) used by the LAM, memorized in raster format.

The MODELMap application developed by FINSIEL may be adopted by operative meteorological services that run their own LAM or by users who receive through telecommunications, the numerical output of a forecast model run by another service. The application may be used to manage the graphical elaboration of meteorological fields estimated by diagnostic or prognostic models.