Design Issues in Nearly Real-Time Meteorological-Data Systems at Local Sites

A scheme developed at the University of Maryland is described to illustrate the high-level design decisions that must be made in order to utilize fully the asynchronous character-oriented data transmitted over the Domestic Data Service. The authors list the major functions that nearly real-time meteorological data systems must perform at local sites, and then emphasize solutions to the high-level design problems implicit in these functions, including processing sequence, data quality control, on-line data file management, off-line data archive content, and archive format.