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Originally posted by Asher
License agreements exist to protect from legal minefields, and I can't believe you're using this in a debate.
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License agreements exist to protect from legal minefields, and I can't believe you're using this in a debate.
The site www.nws.noaa.gov is running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.26 on Linux
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Michael Black
Flying into the storm
by Nancy Eaton
It came to life in the Gulf of Mexico almost overnight, churning and spewing rain. Before long, it was threatening the west coast of Florida with winds rapidly approaching hurricane force.
As Tropical Storm Gabrielle strengthened and moved toward shore in September 2001, Michael Black was taking action in Tampa. But instead of boarding up his windows, Black was busy booting up his PowerBook G4, using an AppleScript to automatically plot a flight plan and fax it to the FAA.
Michael Black was getting ready to fly into the eye of the storm.
NOAA Knows Hurricanes
Black is the field program director for an elite team of U.S. government research meteorologists who study hurricanes the hard way: by flying right into them. The Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Miami has two main jobs: to team up with the Air Force’s 53rd Weather Squadron whenever the National Hurricane Center needs more data about specific storms; and to learn more about hurricanes and tropical storms by conducting independent research.
Equipped with a myriad of cameras, scientific instruments and computer equipment packed from nose to tail, the NOAA’s workhorse P-3 Orion military aircraft are enormous flying hurricane laboratories. Most of the on-board computing is done on UNIX workstations. But starting with the 2001 hurricane season, scientists took along PowerBooks and iBooks to help them study and report from the air. Since then, they’ve discovered that the portable Macs have extended the capabilities of the on-board computing systems in interesting ways, giving them greater flexibility in their work environments and increasing their productivity.
“We are running Mac OS X (Jaguar) on all our Apple machines,” says Black. “We can easily use the terminal, X11 or XDarwin, to communicate with other Unix and Linux workstations both here at the lab and on the aircraft.”
Flight Plan via AppleScript
According to Black, the NOAA first used PowerBooks in 2000 to streamline the filing of flight tracks with the FAA. In the morning before takeoff, meteorologists meet to refine their flight plans into the storm. They log onto the Internet to get satellite and radar information and hold a teleconference with NASA to discuss the mission.
“I get up early and download 100 or so web pages including radar animations, satellite animations, specialized satellite products, track items and bring it all down to the conference room for the briefing,” says Black. “Once we make decisions, we do the flight track. We enter the points we’re flying to. Then, a custom AppleScript calls up our flight tracking software, plots out the points, draws out the track and faxes it to the right people. It used to take us four hours to draw it up by hand and enter it. Now it takes us about half an hour.”
With the flight plan process streamlined, scientists can get into the air a lot faster. This is especially important when dealing with rapidly developing and fast-moving storms like Gabrielle that can immediately threaten coastline communities.
Looking inside the storm
Eye of the Hurricane
Once on board the aircraft, meteorologists use PowerBooks to retrieve various data for their own use and communicate with scientists and media on the ground. “Before, they’d get the data from us, but it would be all coded — they’d just see wind barbs and stuff,” says Black.
“But our actual observations, both visual and oral, are so invaluable to them. We can send them a picture of, say, the eye wall of the hurricane. By looking at the inside of the storm, they can see how intense it is. We can send them a detailed radar picture from the plane that’s just a few minutes old. It’s that kind of capability that’s really going to change things.
“For example, Dr. Paul Chang from NOAA NESDIS flew with us this past season with special instrumentation to remotely map the surface winds over the top of the ocean, so we could compare that with satellite data. Dr. Chang and some of his people built an intranet on one of the aircraft and all of the computers were hooked up to it so that we could all look at data and images.
Real Time Images
“I was able to grab an image of swaths of the surface winds of Hurricane Lily over the Gulf of Mexico, take that into the PowerBook, put a caption on it and email that to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center and various other scientists around the world. I got a lot of positive response from that. People were saying, ‘Wow, it’s great to be able to see something like this in real time while you’re out there flying,’ and ‘I hope you’ll be able to do more of the same.’”
NOAA expects to use imaging technology more extensively once the bandwidth of its satellite-based communications system improves. “All the data that goes back to the ground is sent at about 9600 baud,” says Black. “It’s old technology, but in the next few years the bandwidth will go up. The price has come way down and the technology is changing so rapidly.”
Adds Dr. Frank Marks, director of the Hurricane Research Division, “Our plans are to network the system hooked to the SATCOM on the plane and make it an email and FTP server. This way, we could send email from any system on the plane — Mac, UNIX, or PC — to the ground when a connection is established, or send down different data via FTP.”
Black and his colleagues also use PowerBooks to fetch timely data that enhances their ability to fly within a rapidly changing storm. By downloading satellite images of the storm while they’re in the air, they can make decisions based on another important set of visual data. “We’re not flying blind — we have radar,” says Black. “But it’s not the same as being able to look down from the top of the storm. It may change your plan while you’re out there.”
Storms in Motion
One of the most interesting tasks the meteorologists undertake is to capture videos of the storms. The PowerBooks and iMovie help them edit and produce QuickTime movies from the footage that they can email to ground-based scientists and the media while they’re still in the air.
Black explains, “Each of our aircraft has four mounted digital video cameras. We’ve been recording images on time-lapse, on super VHS. But starting in 2001, we requested a video drop at one of our workstations so that we could hook up a digital camcorder. So instead of doing time-lapse, we can do real-time for interesting parts of the storm. This is where the Apple laptops come in. We can sit there with iMovie and download and encode video real quick and then email it off, or take still images and email them off.
“In the 2002 season, we wanted to make a QuickTime movie from inside a hurricane eye. Unfortunately, the storms we flew in, even though some of them were very strong, weren’t any good visually. So we never got the opportunity to get that this year.”
In-flight entertainment
Portability a Plus
All of the meteorologists fly missions as well as conduct science when they’re safely back on terra firma. And because the scientists use the PowerBooks both on the ground and in the air, they can use the same data and software no matter where they are.
“On the ground, the PowerBooks are our main computers,” says Black. “At the office, I use a separate monitor and have a bunch of USB and FireWire stuff hooked up to it. If I want to take it home, I can do that. For transferring data I use the FireWire connection. I’m able to hook up a FireWire drive and transfer large amounts of data back and forth.”
Once on the aircraft, they connect and work with the permanent UNIX-based data gathering systems on board, as well as with each other to share data. “Our electronics technician, Sean McMillan, hooked up a network for us on the fly so we could network the computers and transfer data from one to the other on board,” says Black. “One PowerBook acted as a FireWire hard drive — a nice capability.”
NOAA scientists also benefit by having the information they collect on the aircraft to use as soon as they land. “Before, we’d have to wait months,” says Black. “They’d have to QC it back in Tampa after the hurricane season, then we’d get a mailing of the tapes, mount the tapes and run special software. Now we can look at data right after the flight and get a preliminary view of what the storm was like, and write up a report right away so that other scientists from around the nation and around the world have an idea of what it was like almost immediately.”
In-flight Entertainment
On the way back from a long mission into hurricane Humberto in 2001, Black thought it might be time for a little onboard R&R, so he again pressed his PowerBook into service. “We’d been working our tails off, putting in 16- and 17-hour days, getting barely any sleep and were totally exhausted. So on the way back from Humberto, I got on the intercom and told everyone on board that in a few moments we were going to have some in-flight entertainment.
“I had put together a collage of our recent successes and hooked up my PowerBook into the video system of the aircraft. I used iTunes to play music in the background and put on a little QuickTime slide show and video show and piped it all through the aircraft’s intercom and video monitors. Even the pilot could glance down and look at this screen and see images of him flying. Everybody loved it.”
More Work for PowerBooks on the Horizon
After two impressive years of service, it’s evident that the PowerBooks have helped the NOAA scientists do more while flying, allowing all their hard work to be available to more people much faster than ever before. It’s also clear that this is just the beginning.
“We have enough enthusiasm for it and have seen such good results,” says Black. “It’s really opened our eyes to what we can do and got us thinking outside the box. We have the capability of using the Macs to do more with the data we collect from instruments on board. Where before, we were talking about these big workstations, big CPUs with big screens, the PowerBooks do so much and they do it fast. It’s really changed things.”
have a nice day
, Soren did some nice things on the civ III ai thanks to it , ...
) it's standart issue in XP (friend pointed it out later). Goes by the name mplayer2.exe in the same folder where is the newest "we don't want you to seek streaming files" WMP's. But the seeking doesn't probably work even in 6.4 if you have WMP9 installed.
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