The Vaisala Global Bureau Service
The Global Bureau Service is a centrally managed data
service, hosted and supported by the Vaisala Road & Rail
Weather service team. Although data is normally owned by the customer,
Vaisala collects, quality checks, archives and provides sensor data whilst
acting as the distribution agent for forecasts from all providers. The service
is monitored and maintained 24 hours a day ensuring the continuous provison of
sensor and forecast data.
The Global Bureau Service was started in 1988 to
satisfy customers who wanted to have the latest sensor and forecast data, but
didn't want the responsibility for the resources, or infrastructure required to
host the data collection themselves. The service was built upon Unix
servers, which polled weather stations and received forecast information from
the forecast providers. Customers using locally installed software, dialled in
to the service to collect sensor and forecast information.
In the year 2000, the system evolved onto an Oracle database and
Vaisala now, hosts one of the World's largest meteorological
databases. 1 million rows of sensor and forecast data are ingested into the
database every day, averaging at 12 rows a second. By Spring
2005, there were over a thousand million rows of roadside weather station
sensor data from across the world.
There are two main methods of data access for customers. Using a
modem, clients can download forecast and sensor records onto their local
machines and view this data via the IceCast IceView
Workstation. Since the implementation of Oracle there has been a shift
toward Internet driven communication protocols and Web solutions. Data can
be downloaded over the internet, with SSH technology providing secure
data transfer. Forecast and sensor data can also be hosted on one of the
Vaisala web servers, allowing password protected web page access to the data.
This use of internet technology has allowed Vaisala Road & Rail
Weather to provide a service to customers around the world.
Vaisala now actively hosts, manages and maintains Ice Prediction services in the
UK, Mainland Europe, New Zealand, Scandinavia and across the USA and Canada.
The advantage of the centrally managed Global Bureau
Service is that Vaisala is responsible for the collection and provision
of reliable data. As the data is hosted and centally managed by Vaisala
several add-on services can be provided such as: