Computer Facilities within the LSC Meteorology Department

The department has a fully-equipped meteorology lab. The lab has been designed to be used for classroom instruction, research, course assignments, and personal interest. It consists primarily of 21 Pentium workstations for student use and an instructor's workstation at the front of the lab. The instructor's computer is connected to an overhead projection system. Over 60% of the classes in the meteorology curriculum are held in the lab.

The new met lab is one part of a sophisticated computer network which allows users to perform a multitude of tasks and acquires and stores a wide variety of meteorological data. Most of the meteorological data that we ingest and store comes from the UNIDATA program. The primary hardware and software components of the network are:

• 19 Pentium 4 workstations for student use in the met lab. The workstations have the capability of running both Linux and Windows 2000 concurrently. On the LINUX side, the workstations can run many meteorology specific software packages such as Unidata's IDV McIDAS-X, GEMPAK, SOLO, WEATHER, These software packages allow students to analyze, overlay, and animate current hourly weather observations, satellite pictures, radar images, and upper air observations. The Linux environment also has many producivity applications available such as web browsers, spread sheets, word processors, and image editors. All machines have internet access. When running Windows, students are able to use BUFKIT, generate HTML documents, give power point presentations, run multi-media software such as the COMET modules, and have access to other commonly used office packages. We also have ESRI's ArcView software available so that GIS tools may be used for analysis of meteorological data in conjunction with other datasets.
• The lab also functions as a compute cluster for parallel processing of forecast models.
• Overhead projection system for the lab.
• NOAAport Receiver system. This system provides a constant stream of meteorological data 24 hours a day to our lab and web server. The system was purchased from Planetary Data Inc. a company co-founded by Declan Cannon, an LSC alumnus.
• Two file servers:
  1. Dual CPU server running FreeBSD This is our primary data server for the met lab
  2. Dual CPU server running Linux. This is our server for the department's web site
• SuomiNet Receiver
• Various computer equipment dedicated for use within the meteorology program such as scanner, several printers, tape drives.

The department has a WeatherProducer system from Weather Services International (WSI).  

The WeatherProducer is a state-of-the-art weather graphics production system used at over 60% of the TV stations around the country. The LSC Meteorology Department was the first recipient of such a system under the WSI on-campus program. LSC Meteorology Broadcast students prepare their own TV weather briefings with this equipment.  Their briefings are aired live on a local cable access channel to more than 10,000 households.  This experience gives our Broadcast Meteorology Students a competitive advantage in the work place as few Meteorology schools around the country have such a system on campus. Our WSI system was aquired with the assistance of James Roemer, a department alumnus and president of WeatherRisk Institute, Inc. and BestSkiWeather.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Other meteorological instrumentation includes: 

• a modern local weather observation station which continually displays and archives output from remote electronic sensors
• a high resolution temperature sonde launch, tracking and analysis system
• a variety of portable observing platforms for field studies.

The department is continually upgrading its equipment to keep up with the latest technological developments. Students have the opportunity to develop weather forecast and presentation skills in conjunction with the college weather-phone, radio station, and television station. Real-time weather information is made available to the LSC and Vermont State College communities through the LSC Meteorology WWW server.