CineSat Configuration and System Requirements
		The CineSat system comes with The High-Performance Forecasting Server (optionally) The CineSat Software (installed on the server) and All Support required to immediately start operation You can of course also purchase the CineSat system without the server option and install the software on your own computers. In this case, please refer to the following link for a summary of the server's hard- and software specifications: CineSat Server Specifications ... This page summarizes the basic CineSat configuration issues and interface requirements.
		Integration Facility Requirements Data Requirements Image Interface Requirements
	Integration
		CineSat is designed as an Image Processing and Forecast Plug-In to your existing meteo data processing systems. It takes your site specific image data, computes the weather analysis and forecast products and delivers results again in your site specific formats. This way, CineSat can be smoothly integrated into existing Display Systems without the need to operate a separate graphical user interface. The demanding CineSat algorithms require a high-performance UNIX platform that is not slowed down by other applications. The recommended procedure is to run the operational CineSat processing chains and offline research work on different CineSat servers.	Integration Smoothly integrates into existing environments High performance platform Stores back results in your site specific formats On-site support to integration
	Top	The import of your data is usually being configured as flat file access via FTP or remotely mounted directories (e.g. NFS). CineSat stores back results in your user specific formats to a user configurable (remote) directory structure, or just offers all results in exported local file systems.
	Facility Requirements
		CineSat is designed as a plug-in to existing meteo systems. The minimum facilities required at your site are: A local area network A satellite image receiver (see below) A computer serving as source for CineSat input image data, which may be directly the image reception computer Optional image display workstations; CineSat comes with a basic result browsing facility but a separate, fully featured meteo data display system is recommended
		The graphic below shows a typical installation in a meteorological network environment. The CineSat Server accesses the satellite images as remote files over your network, e.g. from an image archive server. All CineSat weather products are being displayed either with CineSat's native menu interface, or by viewing CineSat's HTML-based result pages with a standard web browser, or most important on your existing meteo data visualization workstations.
	Top	Click to enlarge
	Data Requirements
		Image pixel data: The primary input data to CineSat are the pixels of a satellite image. The actually required inputs depend on your set-up of the Automatic Product Extraction chains. Typically, CineSat reads in the real-time, half-hourly (or 15-minute), high-resolution images of one or more geostationary meteorological satellites in all spectral channels (see Image Requirements).
	Top	Additional information and data may be provided but are not necessary to compute the basic nowcasting products, e.g.: Image calibration & navigation: If the image calibration and navigation information is available, CineSat can output its weather analysis and forecast tables also in geographical coordinates and temperature values instead of only pixel coordinates and pixel values. Geo-reference information is also necessary for applying image re-projection. But calibration and navigation data are not mandatory to compute the basic nowcasting products. Vertical temperature profiles: If vertical temperature profiles are available, CineSat can assign a height to the atmospheric motion vectors and convective cells derived from infra-red or water vapor imagery. Without these profile data only pixel values or temperatures are available, but this turned out to be sufficient at most sites. Fixed locations used as trajectory starting or end points: Predicted CineSat trajectories can start (or end) at user defined locations, like observation stations and airports. Just provide a list of X/Y image coordinates or longitude/latitude coordinates and get the predicted movement of these locations (trajectories) as ASCII table or as overlay on a satellite image. You can e.g. provide most recent rain or lightning observations to predict their further path, or a set of airport locations to compute which weather will approach the airports in the next hours.
	Image Requirements
	Image Sources		Powerful general image processing tool
		CineSat accepts the (half-)hourly, high-resolution digital data from all current geostationary meteorological satellites. As soon as available, it will also accept and process the 15 minute Meteosat 2nd Generation data. CineSat is also a powerful general image processing tool that you can apply to any kind of image data from 1 to 16 bit per pixel, like radar images or artificially computed data (e.g. numerical model fields). The rest of this section describes the interface requirements for a standard set-up - i.e. for the processing of satellite weather images.	Image Sources for Nowcasting High-resolution digital images from geostationary meteo. satellites at least half-hourly
	Interface Procedure
		The basic interface procedure is quite simple: CineSat internally uses a standard graphics format. Your pre-processed (e.g. re-formatted, calibrated, projected, clipped, ...) site-specific image data are simply interfaced by an appropriate image conversion tool. The programmatic image interface is documented and accessible by the user. The implementation of the interface to one site-specific image format is already included in the CineSat Software License price. All CineSat interfaces are open and documented and can, of course, also be adapted by your own trained personnel. An example: At the German met. office CineSat had been set up to process Meteosat images in a site specific format. After a few weeks the users already successfully applied CineSat to their weather radar data and numerical weather prediction fields, which had been coded as artificial image channels.
	Satellite Image Content Requirements
		The standard configuration of CineSat's Automatic Product Extraction requires half-hourly (or quarterly), High-resolution digital images with the infra-red, water vapor, and visible image channels from a geostationary weather satellite Any of your site specific image pre-processing (like projection, clipping, format conversion, etc.) must maintain a geometric and radiometric resolution comparable in its quality to the original images. Image Resolution better than 8*8 km per pixel. Successive images of the same spectral channel must have the same calibration or a known calibration function. Successive images of the same spectral channel must have the same projection or at least known projection parameters. The images must not contain any burnt-in overlays since these would hide image data and prevent such areas from being successfully forecasted. Comments: It is recommended to provide CineSat with the original, full resolution image data as being received by e.g. a PDUS station. The pre-processing of the raw data (like projecting, calibration, sunlight correction, ...) can be performed by the CineSat software itself. If you intend to provide CineSat with pre-processed images, they should show your region of interest in the image center, surrounded by an at least 100 pixel border. You can use any projection. For most sites (aside equatorial regions), a polar-stereographic projection would be a good choice. Pre-processed images must not reduce the radiometric or geometric quality of the original satellite data. The use of Low Resolution or Analog Images (e.g. WEFAX) is possible for certain applications, but not recommended, since nowcasting accuracy may decrease drastically. For the standard set-up, you should provide the 30-minute infra-red, 30-minute visible (during daytime), and 30- to 60-minutes water vapor image channels. As a minimum, the half-hourly infra-red images are required for computing weather forecast products. If the calibration and navigation information is available for your image data, CineSat can also reproject the images and output its analysis and forecast tables in geographical coordinates and temperatures in addition to pixel coordinates and pixel values.
	Image Interface Requirements
	Top	To automatically ingest your input images, CineSat requires Flat file access to an image directory of a network server using ftp, rcp or mounted directories Image directory structure and file naming convention that allows an automated software access to your image files Directly supported image formats are: PNG, Portable Network Graphics Sun Raster Graphics Windows Bitmap PBM, PGM, and PPM (Portable Bitmaps) PIF, XPIF (for VCS PDUS stations) OpenMTP (Eumetsat RapidScan and archive images) All other standard formats can be ingested using of one the many image conversion tools available for Unix or by dedicated conversion programs. Optionally, CineSat uses the images in your site specific projection and format. A description of this format must be available for the set-up and testing of the respective image interface program. CineSat is designed for a Smooth integration into existing processing chains Please do not hesitate to contact us to clarify any of your further questions. Your support team in Vienna is looking forward to your call.
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