A DIGITAL SIGNAGE SOLUTION FOR SEVERE WEATHER MONITORING AND FORECASTING

Fábio Sato - Head of IT

sato@simepar.br

1/simeparparana @simeparpr

ABOUT US

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We are located at Curitiba in the south of Brazil

We are a self-sustained private non-profit organization responsible for the operation of the meteorological and hydrological system of Paraná state in Brazil

INFRASTRUCTURE - STATIONS

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•Network of 110 automatic stations: 43 meteorological, 51 hydrological, 16 rain gauges

•C o o p e r a t i o n / P a r t n e r s h i p agreements with many Brazilian and Latin American institutions for data exchange and technical cooperation

•We receive and process online data from more than 3,000 stations

INFRASTRUCTURE - RADARS

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S-Band Single Polarization Location: Teixeira Soares/PR Start of Operation: 1997

S-Band Dual Polarization Location: Cascavel/PR Start of Operation: 2014

•Two dopp le r S -Band Doppler radars at Paraná !

•Operation, calibration and maintenance done by our staff !

•In teg r a t ion and da ta exchange wi th other in s t i tu t ions in Br az i l , Paraguay and Argentina.

!

INFRASTRUCTURE - LIGHTNING

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•R INDAT: Br az i l i an

Lightning Detection

Network

•35 operational sensors

•To t a l L i g h t n i n g n e t w o r k o n t h e western region of PR state !!

ACTIVITIES AND SERVICES

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Development Operations

METEOROLOGY !

HYDROLOGY !

REMOTE SENSING !

AGRICULTURE !

COMPUTER SCIENCE

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

WEATHER AND HYDROLOGY

MONITORING AND FORECAST

!MAINTENANCE AND

OPERATION OF MONITORING NETWORKS

!IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Research

CUSTOMERS

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Power Companies

Water supply

Hydro-Met Services

Industrial Plants

Construction

Government Agencies

Road Concessionaries

Media

Oil Refineries/Plants

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE

Data Visualization

Climate and Hydrology Data Management Systems

Weather Forecasting and Nowcasting

Early Warning Systems

SINALMET

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Each operation center had different requirements about information and area of interest

The problem we were trying to solve

Electric power distribution company wanted to display our webpages and applications on large TV displays deployed at their operation centers

5 o p e r a t i o n c e n t e r s geographical ly distr ibuted across the state

SINALMET

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Our webpages and applications were not appropriate for this purpose !Hard to read texts and to interpret images from distance !We searched for solutions and didn’t find specific software for this scenario

TV broadcast solutions were too expensive

Our initial approach

SINALMET

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Our initial approachWe decided to buy and use a general purpose digital signage solution and setup it to disseminate our content

SINALMET

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We setup 2 large displays (LED TVs) for each operation center !1 display for applications and the other for digital signage solution client

Our initial approach

•Small computer (Mac Mini) attached to back of the TVs

•Computer connected to an extranet of the customer

•Content dissemination via dedicated link between

INITIAL SOLUTION

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Digital Signage client software requires computer reboot sometimes (manufacturers usually

recommends daily reboots)

Technical Problems

Difficult to interact with the data visualization applications that were not designed for distant

interaction

Could not be used on wall screens or displays because of corporate IT policies and security

requirements

INITIAL SOLUTION

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It was hard to scale !

Every new installation required the acquisition of dedicated displays, computer, software licenses, local

installation !

Deployment barriers: different corporate IT policies

!New installations are expensive and we

costs don’t scale down

INITIAL SOLUTION

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Technical support was a pain. !

We used VNC and SSH to remotely control computers and software, but sometimes we

couldn’t reach the computer !

Every new computer had to be continuously monitored

!Slow connections to distant control centers

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SINALMET

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Should we develop our own solution for this?

Avoid "not invented here syndrome”: we did new research but we still were not happy with the solutions we found

!We believed that it would be possible to develop a HTML based system for a "Weather Digital

Signage" solution !

We developed a prototype in less than 3 weeks !

The HTML-based prototype was able to provide better functionality than our original approach.

!We decided that it was worth to develop it

SINALMET

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!What is SINALMET?

It is a digital platform for the dissemination on large displays of weather, hydrology and environmental information

It runs entirely on the web browser !

It uses new technologies available on HTML5 and CSS3 compatible web browsers

!It is scalable and low cost

!It doesn’t require dedicated hardware: use

existing computer and low-cost solutions like Chromecast

!It can comply with corporate IT policies

!It requires almost zero tech support

SINALMET

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How did we developed it? !

HTML5 + CSS + JS

Web formats: XML and JSON !

OGC web standards: WMS and WFS !

PostgreSQL + PostGIS

Unidata THREDDS !

Geoserver and Mapserver !

RESTFul APIs: systems integration !

Javascript-based data visualization libraries !

SINALMET - RADAR

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Assimilates raw volume and product files Generates basic radar products: PPI, CAPPI and mosaics/composites

Integration with lightning data

SINALMET - LIGHTNING

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!Displays data from a Vaisala lightning processing central

by connecting to a live UALF feed over Internet for realtime lightning data access

SINALMET- SATELLITE

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Displays infrared channels of GOES or METEOSAT satellites Radar and lightning can be overlaid to highlight storm cells

SINALMET - FORECAST

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Presentation of forecast data available in XML or JSON formats

SINALMET - STATIONS

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Automatic assimilation and interpolation of weathers stations data

SINALMET - WARNING

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Dissemination of Early Warnings

SINALMET - DEMO

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SINALMET - ROADMAP

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So, what’s next?

Mobile support (smartphones and tablets)

Packaging for smart TVs stores !

Integration with nowcast systems, e.g.: TITAN, lightning storm tracking, and satellite based algorithms

!Dissemination of CAP (Common Alerting Protocol)

messages !

Social media: filter and display relevant information with natural language and machine learning

algorithms !

SINALMET

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QUESTIONS

Visit www.simepar.br/portfolio for more information