NinJo is a

meteorological Meteorology is the scientific study of the Earth's atmosphere and short-term atmospheric phenomena (i.e. weather), with a focus on weather forecasting. It has applications in the military, aviation, energy production, transport, agriculture ...

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

system. It is a community project of the German Weather Service, the Meteorological Service of Canada, the

Danish Meteorological Institute The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI; ) is the official Danish meteorological institute, administrated by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities. It makes weather forecasts and observations for Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Is ...

, MeteoSwiss, and the German

Bundeswehr The (, ''Federal Defence'') are the armed forces of the Germany, Federal Republic of Germany. The is divided into a military part (armed forces or ''Streitkräfte'') and a civil part, the military part consists of the four armed forces: Germ ...

. It consists of modules for monitoring

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloud cover, cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmo ...

events, editing point

forecasts Forecasting is the process of making predictions based on past and present data. Later these can be compared with what actually happens. For example, a company might estimate their revenue in the next year, then compare it against the actual resu ...

and viewing meteorological data. An additional batch component is able to render graphical products off-line, these may, for example, be visualized by a web service. Essentially it is a client—server system an implemented fully with the programming language

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

. NinJo was initiated by the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) and the

German army The German Army (, 'army') is the land component of the armed forces of Federal Republic of Germany, Germany. The present-day German Army was founded in 1955 as part of the newly formed West German together with the German Navy, ''Marine'' (G ...

(Bundeswehr Geo Information Service, BGIS) in 2000. Since 2006, NinJo has been used operationally. NinJo is licensed for weather services, organisations and universities not taking part in the development consortium.

Description

NinJo is a client-server system with interactive displays on the client side fed by batch applications implemented on the server. The system is programmed entirely in

and can easily be extended by further layers and applications according to user-specific requirements. The workstation fed by the servers can be installed on different operating systems (e.g.

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

), avoiding importing the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

onto the specific operating system. The NinJo Server imports a variety of meteorological data, such as

METAR METAR is a format for reporting weather information. A METAR weather report is predominantly used by aircraft pilots, and by meteorologists, who use aggregated METAR information to assist in weather forecasting. Raw METAR is highly standardize ...

reports,

weather radar A weather radar, also called weather surveillance radar (WSR) and Doppler weather radar, is a type of radar used to locate precipitation (meteorology), precipitation, calculate its motion, and estimate its type (rain, snow, hail etc.). Modern w ...

and

weather satellite A weather satellite or meteorological satellite is a type of Earth observation satellite that is primarily used to monitor the weather and climate of the Earth. Satellites are mainly of two types: polar orbiting (covering the entire Earth asyn ...

images and

numerical weather prediction Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to weather forecasting, predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of comput ...

(NWP) outputs, through dedicated file handling programs, and make them accessible to the client displays. The client is a NinJo

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

which presents data in separate layers. Users can add as many layers to a NinJo scene as they want with all layers show time-synchronised data for the same map area. The layers show geo-referenced data, not fix images, so the screen display is always done directly from the data and interactive probing using the mouse is giving the values of the original data, not a scale extracted one. The data are stored in native format, rather than stored in a common internal format, avoiding degradation in zooms and always keeping the full details and resolution of the original data. The layers are independent, can be added and removed from the scenes separately, and be set visible or invisible. Layers can be arranged in any order the users want enabling them to arrange all data types according to their specific needs. Scenes can be set for: *Visualisation of weather products *Monitoring the state of data input *Production of weather warnings *Interactive editing of texts *Configuration of NinJo batch products Different tools are available for enhancing or interrogating the displays. For example, it is possible to do vertical cross-sections in a layered scene, extracting the vertical structure of NWP or radars data.

References

External links

* * * {{cite web, url=http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/success/ninjo.html , title=Java Advanced Imaging in Action (NinJo), archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070311001958/http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/success/ninjo.html, archive-date=2007-03-11 Science software Graphic software in meteorology Weather prediction Bundeswehr Meteorological Service of Canada