BMT 580 01 NCC - Management Systems

Forums

Results must:
Results must
Enter start and end date Date:
From:   
  
To:   
Previous
Information Timeliness - Weather Tracking Systems There are 2 replies:
Dustin Steven Schanzmeyer Students Author: Dustin Steven Schanzmeyer, Email: DSSchanzmeyer@owls.williamwoods.edu   Show MyInfo popup for Dustin Steven Schanzmeyer
Information Timeliness - Weather Tracking Systems Original post: Tue 10/11/2011 at 9:47 PM

Information timeliness is a major consideration for weather tracking systems.  Weather changes every second of every minute of every day and these changes are crucial, especially when severe weather is involved.  There are many aspects of weather including temperature, precipitation, barometric pressure, and wind gusts and directions.  All of these dynamic aspects are important to the overall description of weather and in providing analytical data.  Weather is different across all geographical locations but by observing weather, patterns can be uncovered to aid in predicting weather in other geographic locations or in the future.  Because of all of these factors, weather data is very important in many aspects and is considered very time sensitive data.

Due to the fact that the analytical data provided by weather is ever changing, the timeliness in recording it is very important.  Applications which gather the weather data must be very powerful and work nonstop to continue recording new data.  A system of this dimension must also be very robust in order log the many types of data from so many different regions continuously.  The data warehouse which stores this information should be very robust as data needs to be updated into the database continuously.   Because data from weather is used to predict weather patterns and universal weather trends, it also becomes very important that data is never lost or destroyed.  A data warehouse for weather data needs to be redundant and highly available. 

Disaster recovery and backups also become very important in analyzing a data warehouse for weather data.  It has been stated that it is crucial for the data to be constantly updated to ensure that all data is recorded but their must also be a way to ensure that the data is never lost or destroyed.  This is done through developing an effective back up plan and high availability disaster recover solution so that data could quickly be recovered in the event of a disaster or failed hardware.  To do this hardware should be configured to perform frequent backups throughout the day to a backup data warehouse onsite which could act as a failover in the event there would be a hardware or software failure on the production system.  The next aspect that should be covered is that data would then be backed up off site to a co-location where in the event the primary location was destroyed the data could still be recovered.  This frequency of updates and backups would allow all of the crucial weather data to be constantly available and never lost.

Gregory Joe Wood Students Author: Gregory Joe Wood, Email: GJWood@owls.williamwoods.edu   Show MyInfo popup for Gregory Joe Wood
Re: Information Timeliness - Weather Tracking Systems Posted: Sun 10/16/2011 at 4:35 PM, in reply to Dustin Steven Schanzmeyer
Dustin, you have a lot of very interesting facts in your posting.  I hadn't really thought about it a lot before reading your posting, but it seems that the timeliness of the updates would have to be done on an almost minute-by-minute basis.  I was thinking in areas where the weather is clear, maybe the updates wouldn't need to be done as often, but in areas where storms are cropping up or the weather is unsettled, the updates would need to be done more often.  Does this make sense to you? Of course, I'm not sure how the decision would be made as far as what events would trigger more or less frequent updates.
 
I have heard anchors on the weather channel speak about how much human and computer efforts are required in order to attempt to accurately predict the weather.  I don't think the general public really understands how much technology is used for weather predictions.  They (the public) just want nearly perfect reporting of an imperfect situation.  Since the paramaters that affect weather change so often, even the most powerful databases cannot accurately see into the future very far.
 
Again, I think you raised great points with your posting and I agree with your assessment of updating and backup frequencies.
 
Nichole Sheree Williams Students Author: Nichole Sheree Williams, Email: NSWilliams@owls.williamwoods.edu   Show MyInfo popup for Nichole Sheree Williams
Re: Information Timeliness - Weather Tracking Systems Posted: Sun 10/16/2011 at 7:43 PM, in reply to Dustin Steven Schanzmeyer
Dustin I couldn't agree with you more in the fact that time is of the essence when it comes to tracking the weather. The weather is constantly changing whether it be a shift in the wind or drop in temperature. It is so crucial for the information to be updated constantly in order for meteroligist to be able to even have a prediction of what might be come. I can't imagine how much data is processed through those systems in such a short amount of time and the importance of backing the date up consistantly in order to increase the ability to predict weather patterns- I would actually love to watch it be done for just a day. Although I am the first to critisize the weather man when he doesn't get the weather right, I can't imagine how you would even predict something as mother nature.