Speaker
Mr
Daniel Lee
(DWD)
Description
The German Weather Service (DWD) provides a wide variety of services for
the protection of life and property in the form of weather and climate
information. One core task is safeguarding aviation, marine safety and
terrestrial traffic. Another is warning before meteorological events
that could endanger public safety and order. Additionally, we monitor
the climate and are active in multiple research fields, from ensemble
numerical weather forecasting to applications of weather data in new
areas. Data is recorded, processed and transformed into time-critical
products and securely archived 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
The DWD maintains a high productivity, redundant infrastructure in order
to provide these services reliably and on demand. We ensure
deliverability with multiple tiers of failover strategies, enabling us
to manage and monitor production even when faced with major hardware or
software failures.
Specialized systems allow rapid access to large, cross-sectional binary
files in file system caches for near-real-time applications, while an
automated tape archive provides short-term access to long-term archival
data. Simultaneously, observational data is processed and stored in
relational databases in order to allow comfortable processing of long
time series data. Various application layers are used to post-process
products in order to refine them for domain-specific queries.
Demands for weather and climate based data and services, as well as the
associated needs for processing power, network transfer capabilities and
storage capacity are constantly increasing. It is the DWD's goal not
only to maintain a production infrastructure with high quality and
availability, but also to continue to evolve to meet these demands.
Doing so while maintaining our tradition of quality, speed and
reliability is one of the major challenges facing the DWD. Some current
projects designed to meet these goals are introduced in the outlook.
Primary author
Mr
Daniel Lee
(DWD)
