LAWEB (Lake Weather Broadcast): Data Processing for the Great Lakes

摘要

The paper describes a program which gathers all of the available observations on the Great Lakes and presents them in two, unified formats. The first format is a broadcast text which is read over the Great Lakes VHF radio system every six hours during the shipping season. The text contains wind and wave reports as well as weather and visibility when the visibility is less than four miles. The second format is that of a standard AFOS plot file, complete with sea level pressure, temperature, dew point, water temperature and wave height, when available. National Weather Service (NWS) offices can produce customized graphic displays and analyses from this file using the PMOD system of programs and various mesoscale analysis routines. A great effort has been made to produce a program which will allow major revisions of the output products without altering the FORTRAN code.