A web service based tool to plan atmospheric research flights

Abstract

We present a web service based tool for the planning of atmospheric researchflights. The tool provides online access to horizontal maps and verticalcross-sections of numerical weather prediction data and in particular allowsthe interactive design of a flight route in direct relation to thepredictions. It thereby fills a crucial gap in the set of currently availabletools for using data from numerical atmospheric models for research flightplanning. A distinct feature of the tool is its lightweight, web servicebased architecture, requiring only commodity hardware and a basic Internetconnection for deployment. Access to visualisations of prediction data isachieved by using an extended version of the Open Geospatial Consortium WebMap Service (WMS) standard, a technology that has gained increased attentionin meteorology in recent years. With the WMS approach, we avoid the transferof large forecast model output datasets while enabling on-demand generatedvisualisations of the predictions at campaign sites with limited Internetbandwidth. Usage of the Web Map Service standard also enables access tothird-party sources of georeferenced data. We have implemented the softwareusing the open-source programming language Python. In the present article, wedescribe the architecture of the tool. As an example application, we discussa case study research flight planned for the scenario of the 2010Eyjafjalla volcano eruption. Usage and implementation details areprovided as Supplement. © Author(s) 2012. CC Attribution 3.0 License.