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April 4, 2002
MEMORANDUM FOR: RAMM Team
FROM: David Watson
SUBJECT: EUMETSAT Training Visit
Darmstadt, Germany
March 19-27, 2002
On March 19-27, I traveled to EUMETSAT in Darmstadt, Germany to setup a RAMSDIS system and provide RAMSDIS and Visitview training. The trip was setup to coincide with the visit of two African meteorologists to EUMETSAT. They were there on a four-week visit to gain knowledge and prepare training material to take back to their home country. Funding for the visit was provided by EUMETSAT.
I spent the first day setting up a faster system with RAMSDIS-NT. They don’t seem to use the RAMSDIS that we sent them (P5-90 I think), at least it was off during my visit. There were some problems with the setup because of their system administration standards (ISO something something). They require all systems be exactly the same to reduce the administration overhead. This caused some small quirks in setting up the system. The RAMSDIS training commenced the next day. My audience was Gordon Bridge (EUMETSAT consultant), Henk Verschuur (EUMETSAT training officer), José Prieto (EUMETSAT), and the two African visitors; Nicholas Maingi and Gitonga Ignatius (Nairobi, Kenya). I gave a short presentation on RAMSDIS, which gave an overall view of the system and its functions. Then we did some hands on lab exercises, going through all the main functions of RAMSDIS via the GUI.
The next day I gave a short presentation on VISITview. This mainly talked about what VISITview is and how the VISIT program works. We then watched and listened to Tom Whittaker’s downloadable session titled “How to make a VISITview session using the lesson builder”. This session showed them how VISITVIEW is used and also gave them a feel for how a session might be done using pre-recorded audio. Questions arose about possible tele-communication issues in Africa and the thought of using voice-over-lan type of applications (i.e. yahoo messenger, MS net meeting). But they could use the embedded audio as a start.
We then spent the afternoon going back over using RAMSDIS and spent a little more time on the actual commands RAMSDIS runs via the GUI. We also looked at five case studies; a typical ingest case, a GOES rapid scan case, an autoestimator case, a fire product case, and a climatology case. I then setup RAMSDIS to ingest overnight from the Costa Rica server. The next day they were able to get a feel for what the system looks and feels like while ingesting and also a little bit about how to troubleshoot problems that might occur.
I spent the last day answering questions and letting them load some meteosat images subsected over KENYA. They practiced most of the day manipulating these images in a variety of ways.
Some of the main points that arose concerning both RAMSDIS and VISITview were the internet connection in Africa. Many of the countries have very limited bandwidth, so ingesting on RAMSDIS and communicating with VISITview would be difficult right now. But they liked RAMSDIS’s ability to work with digital satellite data and they thought it would help in the short term with making case study training material. The African’s were interested in getting RAMSDIS but the installation would have to be done manually instead of using an image, unless they were to receive new equipment (which was a possibility). EUMETSAT would also like to setup their new RAMSDIS system to ingest, but this would mean setting up a local ingest server or ingesting the data from NESDIS.
During my time there I was given a tour of their groundstation including a talk about their past, present and future satellites. A lot of talk was about the new MSG and it’s problems and possible solutions. It was interesting to see their quality assurance operations and data storage system. Also I found out that meteosat data older than 24 hours is free of charge to request. Whether we could request this data, I don’t know. They currently are using large automated DLT libraries for storage and then place the data on an ftp server.
Attached are pictures of EUMETSAT, the visiting Africans (Nicholas and Ignatius), Gordon Bridge, and myself at the RAMSDIS workstation.