Sea Indian Ocean South Pacific Ocean Southern Ocean Coral

• Main Authors: Melbourne Cairns, Wagga Wagga, Port Hedland, Tennant Creek, Streaky Bay, Bass Strait
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Indian; Pacific; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.54.7383; http://www.dhpc.adelaide.edu.au/reports/001/dhpc-001.ps.gz

This document describes our plans for building a distributed Geographic Information System (DGIS). We believe the current hardware and software technologies available to us can be integrated together to provide a glimpse of the sort of system that will become routinely available to end-users in a few years. We have considered a number of end-user niches and are focusing on environmental applications including: agricultural decision support; climate and weather prediction; and soil and land care management. Scenarios for typical users in these areas are described in section 2. We also expect to gain insights into a number of more technologically driven aspects of distributed geographic information systems such as the distributed management of very large scientific data repositories. Some of these issues, and how we propose to address them, are discussed in section 5. We believe this project to be a worthwhile directed application of current DHPC technology against the background of global climatic change and the need for improved management of scarce natural resources and increased automation of traditionally labour intensive activities like crop production. The project is built around applications access to data from the Geostationary Meteorological Satellites. In particular we consider data from the Japanese Meteorological Agency's (JMA) Satellite "Himawara 5", known as GMS-5. This provides visible spectra and Infra-Red (IR) spectra data for a large region of the earth including Australia (as shown in figure 1). Information about the GMS data and the issues concerning an on-line repository for users and applications is described in section 3. We describe some of the data processing requirements for environmental applications in section 4. We describe the storage hardwa.