NM Climate Center Operational Overview
The New Mexico Climate Center (NMCC) uses a small set of server computers to collect, store, and display climate data. Data is collected over the Internet and through analog phone connections to weather stations deployed around New Mexico. There are currently three servers in use by the NMCC: Virga, Drought, and Weather. Refer to Figure 1 for a visual representation of the data collection network maintained by NMCC.
Figure 1.
Refer to Figure 2 for an expanded view of the Internet data network from which Virga collects data. With the exception of the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) Hyper-text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server, Virga collects data for only one weather station network from each server. The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) data is gathered from the MRGCD File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, National Resources Conservation Service SNOTEL data is collected from the SNOTEL FTP server, Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) Tower data is collected from the LANL HTTP server, and Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) data is gathered from the RAWS HTTP server. Data from the National Weather Service (NWS) automated stations, Union Pacific Railroad (UPR) network, and the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) are collected from the MADIS HTTP server. Data from some weather stations are directly accessed via the Internet, using software applications such as Loggernet.
Figure 2.
Virga collects data directly from many weather stations using a standard phone network. The phone connected weather stations belong to the following networks: NMCC Network, Dr. Salim Bawazir's Elephant Butte Irrigation District (EBID) network, and the NMSU Viticulture network (WINE). These weather stations use either a standard analog phone line connection or a cellular connection. A hardware modem is directly connected to Virga, via the RS-232 serial port, and this modem is connected to an analog phone line in the NMCC office. At a given time, Loggernet, installed on Virga, will call each station individually and request the station's data be transmitted via the phone connection to Virga. Refer to Figure 3 for a representation of this collection network.
Figure 3.
Weather functions as a copy of Virga, so it uses the data collected by Vigra to populate its database. The only exception is LANL Tower data, where both Weather and Virga download the data concurrently. Because the LANL Tower data is available only in 15 minute increments, both servers download the data to insure that, if one server goes down, the other server will be able to get the data. Refer to Figure 4 to view the data collection network for Weather.
Figure 4.
Drought collects and serves only NM Community, Collaborative, Rain, Hail and Snow data. The climate data Virga collects is available to Drought for copying, however, there is currently no need for that functionality. See Figure 5 for a representation of the data network used by Drought.
Figure 5.
After all data has been downloaded by the servers, Weather and Virga run a processing application to interpolate any missing or skewed values. The processed data is made available and the raw data is also made available, via HTTP. LANL Tower data is only available in raw form and no processing is performed on that data set. Drought makes available the NM CoCoRaHS data and station information immediately after download with no processing necessary. The schedule for downloading and processing the data is discussed in another document. Refer to Figure 6.
Figure 6.
This concludes the operational overview for the NMCC office. More specific documentation is available detailing the several aspects of the NMCC computer systems.