| Popis: |
EUMETSAT has been providing operational meteorological satellite data services to European and US (via NOAA) national weather centers since the launch of Metop-A in October 2006. The service is characterized by high availability requirements and low latency delivery, essential for the accuracy of numerical weather predictions. However, further improvements in the data delivery timeliness would clearly have benefits to accuracy and availability of short-term weather predictions. To this end, EUMETSAT, together with partners in NOAA, NASA and the US National Science Foundation embarked on a project to provide an Antarctic Data Acquisition (ADA) capability using the McMurdo Ground Station. Coupled with the existing downlink of global data at Svalbard in the Arctic this would reduce the latency by close to a factor of two, benefiting from downlinks near each pole. The challenge was to introduce this major improvement to a key system requirement on an already operational system, without impacting the availability or quality of existing services during the integration and testing of the ADA and after its introduction into the operational system. Touching almost every element of the system design and operation, including the satellite operation, the Svalbard satellite data management, the EUMETSAT central site product generation and dissemination facilities, as well as NOAA processing and dissemination facilities, this paper highlights the challenges faced by the Project and the process by which risks to on-going operational services were minimized and non-intrusive testing possibilities were put in place. Conclusions are drawn concerning the aspects of this process which were critical to its success, such as the extensive configuration management |
