Senior Project - MIDaS

The Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), develops real-time national weather analysis and forecast models. A critical component of this development is the dissemination and evaluation of forecasts generated by the modeling systems to meteorologists both internally and to the global community of scientists. Currently, these models are provided in the form of ready-made plots available online at the FSL website. The problem with this approach is that every user's needs must be anticipated and a large number of plots must be made available on a daily basis. The group developed a web-based interactive system that allows users to select data sets of interest and generate their own custom plots. The approach eliminates the need to store large volumes of ready made plots and adds value to the user by allowing specific data to be viewed by the user community.

MIDaS uses an interface built with Java applets. The MIDaS system consists of several modules written in Java and uses remote method invocation (RMI) to achieve data transfer from the FSL server to each user. The user interface applet handles all data plot customization and has the ability to display images with different transparency settings.