Design a software for meteorological observations

ABSTRACT There are a lot of meteorological stations that are members of World Meteorological Organization (WMO) observing the weather to become successful at weather forecasting or any statistical research related to meteorological parameters over the whole world. Because of observations being the basis duty for any meteorological investment all meteorological stations do different type of observation according to their geographical place and to their technological equipment. There are different types of observations that are done at land meteorological stations. Some of them are synoptic, climatologic, marine, radiosonde and rainfall observations. Different meteorological stations are responsible for different observations. Some of them have to do synoptic observations while others have to do marine or climatologic or both marine and synoptic observations. The two important observation types are the synoptic observation, which is done every hour in a day, and the marine observation, which is done 7 times a day. These meteorological stations doing the synoptic and marine observations have to obey some rules of WMO to have an agreement on the same type of observations. An observation is basically defined as recording the values of the meteorological parameters such as wind, temperature, pressure, and humidity at determined times. These observations are done automatically by the instruments having the sensors of the meteorological parameters, or done manually from the meteorological instruments. At the end of recording these observation values, one important duty is coding them in a standard form. These observations are coded automatically by anVI observation coding system as well as they are coded manually. An observer must know what kind of observation he or she has to do. The first aim of an observer after observing weather should be to code the values collected from meteorological instruments and from the sky. There are standard code techniques of WMO for all meteorologists to code the observations. FERO-1 is a kind of observation coding system, which is improved by Ferkan KAPLANSEREN in 2000-2001 for the meteorological synoptic and marine observations that are prepared on land meteorological stations at determined times to match the standards of WMO. FERO-1 is designed to give alternative opportunities for fast and correct coding to observers working at the meteorological stations in Turkey. An information system for meteorology is formally defined as a collection of data, records or elements of meteorological parameters and the means of obtaining, organizing, retrieving or otherwise processing the data for use. For that reason FERO-1 is designed as an information system, which collects the data, manages the data and by processing data, prepares codes for the synoptic and marine observations. FERO-1 is especially designed for meteorological stations in Turkey; also matching the standards of WMO any station over the world dealing with synoptic observation can use it. During the design time, observers working at Izmir Meteorological Service were consulted about the requirements on the system. Meteorological information is supplied from the meteorological station library and from the observers. The standards of synoptic and marine observation and coding techniques of them declared by WMO are analysed carefully and were applied on users requirements. Other systems studied to understand their advantages and disadvantages for users. For the software part of the design, Borland Delphi 5 Programming Language and Microsoft Access were used. Borland Delphi is used for easy visual implementation for programmer and easy visage of the program for users. Microsoft Access is used for the database of the system. Almost everyVII meteorological station has windows operating system on their computers and most of the observers are familiar with this system. So, because of FERO-1 working on the windows operating system, users get no big difficulty to use it. The need of FERO-1 is thought because of users finding the other systems insufficient and having old technologies for their requests. So, the observation coding part of the systems such as MTVIP (Meteorolojik Veri iletişim Paketi (Meteorological data Communication Package)) and TURK METCAP (Turkish Meteorological Communication and Application Package) are studied to get the dissatisfactions of users, not to repeat these insufficient subjects at FERO-1. Users have met a database, some searching procedures, easy usage and a quality control mechanism at this new system. These are really new opportunities for Turkish observers. FERO-1 gives some other abilities to users to operate the collected data. At the same time the experimental results have shown that it matches most of requirements of users. Because FERO-1 works under Windows operating system users begun to use the mouse and can rich to the menus just clicking the recommended buttons. The automatic prepared forms are so easy for users to fill and forms never imply unnecessary blanks about unneeded meteorological parameter for that observation. The combo boxes don't allow user to fill a different value, which is not appropriated to that parameter. So entering wrong values into database and coding wrong observations are prevented. The calculations and some searches, which are made at the end of the day, are also made by FERO-1 automatically. FERO-1 finds the maximum and the minimum values of temperature, pressure, humidity, wind-speed and water vapor pressure and for the last day. FERO-1 prepares the suitable forms for each observation time, does not allow user prepare wrong type of observation, makes the quality control to entered values, keeps the meteorological data in database, lets user searchVIII the database, prepares the different codes of observations such as synoptic, marine, marine explanation in Turkish, maximum and minimum, lets user do not enter the same values repeatedly for different observations at the same time, calculates the mean sea level pressure, humidity, water vapor pressure and dew point degree at different forms and finds the extreme values of the day.