NinJo is a

meteorological Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences (which include atmospheric chemistry and physics) with a major focus on weather forecasting. The study of meteorology dates back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

system. It is a community project of the

German Weather Service The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in Offenbach am Main, Germany, which monitors weather and meteorological conditions over Germany and provides weather services for the general public and for nautical, avia ...

, the

Meteorological Service of Canada The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC; french: Service météorologique du Canada – SMC) is a division of Environment and Climate Change Canada, which primarily provides public meteorological information and weather forecasts and warnings ...

, the

Danish Meteorological Institute The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI; da, Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut) is the official Danish meteorological institute, administrated by the Ministry of Energy, Utilities and Climate. The institute makes weather forecasts and observati ...

MeteoSwiss MeteoSwiss (german: MeteoSchweiz, french: MétéoSuisse, it, MeteoSvizzera), officially the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, is an office of the federal administration of Switzerland. It employs 290 people at locations in Zurich ...

, and the German

Bundeswehr The ''Bundeswehr'' (, meaning literally: ''Federal Defence'') is the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. The ''Bundeswehr'' is divided into a military part (armed forces or ''Streitkräfte'') and a civil part, the military part con ...

. It consists of modules for monitoring

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...

events, editing point

forecasts Forecasting is the process of making predictions based on past and present data. Later these can be compared (resolved) against what happens. For example, a company might estimate their revenue in the next year, then compare it against the actual ...

and viewing meteorological data. An additional batch component is able to render graphical products off-line, these may, for example, be visualized by a web service. Essentially it is a client—server system an implemented fully with the programming language

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

. NinJo was initiated by the

(Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) and the

German army The German Army (, "army") is the land component of the armed forces of Germany. The present-day German Army was founded in 1955 as part of the newly formed West German ''Bundeswehr'' together with the ''Marine'' (German Navy) and the ''Luftwaf ...

(Bundeswehr Geo Information Service, BGIS) in 2000. Since 2006, NinJo has been used operationally. NinJo is licensed for weather services, organisations and universities not taking part in the development consortium.

Description

NinJo is a client-server system with interactive displays on the client side fed by batch applications implemented on the server. The system is programmed entirely in

JAVA Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

and can easily be extended by further layers and applications according to user-specific requirements. The workstation fed by the servers can be installed on different operating systems (e.g.

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

), avoiding importing the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

onto the specific operating system. The NinJo Server imports a variety of meteorological data, such as

METAR METAR is a format for reporting weather information. A METAR weather report is predominantly used by aircraft pilots, and by meteorologists, who use aggregated METAR information to assist in weather forecasting. Raw METAR is the most common form ...

reports,

weather radar Weather radar, also called weather surveillance radar (WSR) and Doppler weather radar, is a type of radar used to locate precipitation, calculate its motion, and estimate its type (rain, snow, hail etc.). Modern weather radars are mostly puls ...

and

weather satellite A weather satellite or meteorological satellite is a type of Earth observation satellite that is primarily used to monitor the weather and climate of the Earth. Satellites can be polar orbiting (covering the entire Earth asynchronously), or ge ...

images and

numerical weather prediction Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in th ...

(NWP) outputs, through dedicated file handling programs, and make them accessible to the client displays. The client is a NinJo

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

which presents data in separate layers. Users can add as many layers to a NinJo scene as they want with all layers show time-synchronised data for the same map area. The layers show geo-referenced data, not fix images, so the screen display is always done directly from the data and interactive probing using the mouse is giving the values of the original data, not a scale extracted one. The data are stored in native format, rather than stored in a common internal format, avoiding degradation in zooms and always keeping the full details and resolution of the original data. The layers are independent, can be added and removed from the scenes separately, and be set visible or invisible. Layers can be arranged in any order the users want enabling them to arrange all data types according to their specific needs. Scenes can be set for: *Visualisation of weather products *Monitoring the state of data input *Production of weather warnings *Interactive editing of texts *Configuration of NinJo batch products Different tools are available for enhancing or interrogating the displays. For example, it is possible to do vertical cross-sections in a layered scene, extracting the vertical structure of NWP or radars data.

References

External links

* * * {{cite web, url=http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/success/ninjo.html , title=Java Advanced Imaging in Action (NinJo), archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070311001958/http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/success/ninjo.html, archive-date=2007-03-11 Science software Graphic software in meteorology Weather prediction Bundeswehr Meteorological Service of Canada