Met Office / IBL Presentations

Abstract – Horace XP and Visual Weather

HORACE XP is the Met Office name of the new forecaster workstation solution and the name of the project to introduce it. The solution consists of hardware, software, supporting infrastructure and service definitions. The project will replace both the NIMBUS and HORACE systems with a unified system for all forecasting and observing staff.

The primary goal is efficient production of accurate weather forecasts. Forecasters will continue to play a key role in achieving this goal over the next 5 years, through interpretation of NWP, satellite, radar and observation data, from which they derive general guidance and generate customer specific forecast products.

The forecaster workstation is the primary system that presents these data interactively, in sophisticated ways that allow efficient assimilation of the information and subsequent generation of products, including functionality to generate products automatically. The forecaster workstation remains a key feature of the Product Generation System and must integrate with the other systems that provide NWP, observation, radar and satellite information, as well as systems downstream.

Our existing bespoke systems (NIMBUS and HORACE) are now coming to the end of their life, with spares hard to come by and major parts of the system infrastructure no longer supported by suppliers. System failures due to the age of the equipment are already occurring. Although we currently have two such systems, modern technology is capable of providing a single solution for the future, which will reduce our support costs.

In addition, our major customers are refreshing their own infrastructures and require solutions from us that will operate in the modernised environments. The most important of these is the Royal Navy, who is refitting their ships from September 2007 and requires an alternative to HORACE for the new platform.

The Met Office set up a European-wide competition to choose the new forecaster workstation software, with IBL Software Engineering selected as the preferred supplier. IBL is a software company based in Germany and Slovakia that specialises in meteorological systems.

The IBL software, called Visual Weather, is a very exciting product that will provide the Met Office with a flexible and robust platform, upon which we will develop forecast products and services for many years to come.