The MAP Data Centre at MeteoSwiss

Operational aspects

Since July 1st, 2005 the MAP Data Centre (MDC) has moved away from IACETH: it is now hosted at the Swiss national weather service MeteoSwiss in Zurich. The URL changed to http://www.map.meteoswiss.ch and the email address to map@meteoswiss.ch. The data content of the DB and of the files did not change, nor did the appearance and the functionality of the website. Also all documents and all offline data were transferred. The MAP-members database was updated: it contains all MSC-members, all people, who accessed the supplemental data since April 2004, and those people, who logon after request of the MDC manager during April 2005.

There were some changes in the technical architecture, which do not affect the users. These changes were mainly necessary to allow a continuous operation of the MDC within the standardised environment of MeteoSwiss during the years to come:

• the MDC runs on UNIX OS;
• upgrade of the RDBMS software from Oracle8i to Oracle9i;
• MAP-member login through LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol);
• the data query forms were migrated to Java and JSP (Java Server Pages);
• the DB model was redesigned in order to improve the performance and for easier maintenance.

The migration of the MDC from IACETH to MeteoSwiss implied also a change in the staff:

• head of MDC: Christian Haeberli, as successor of Hans Richner;
• MDC manager: Esther Scharnhorst-Haeller, as successor of Claudia Schmengler.

In the name of all MAP people we would like to thank Hans Richner, Hans Hirter, and Claudia Schmengler for their precious work and support, especially during the migration of the MDC. Esther Scharnhorst-Haeller also appreciates very much the friendship and all she learnt working together with Hans Richner, Hans Hirter and Claudia Schmengler: many, many thanks! We also would like to thank IACETH for the resources provided to MAP during all the years.

Database content

In the MDC there were a few changes this year:

• the DAQUAMAP procedure was repeated by Thomas Froelicher: http://www.map.meteoswiss.ch/mm-doc/daquamap/Frameresults.html (see separate article);
• the humidity correction of the radiosounding data was done: http://www.map.meteoswiss.ch/map-doc/query_so nd_main.htm?html_back=/map-doc/sop_info/sop_info.htm&sdate=07.09.1999-00&edate=16.11.1999-00;
• surface data for MAP SOP from North-Eastern Switzerland (Ostluft) were loaded into the MAP DB.