Development of international mirroring system for real-time web of meteorological satellite data

Abstract

The third-generation meteorological satellites equipped with highly-improved imagers provide a huge amount of Earth observation data. Himawari-8 is the first unit of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s third generation of geostationary satellites. After its starting operation in 2015, there are several websites that provide remotely sensed images in real time. However, it is hard to develop a real-time and full-resolution website, due to the large amount of data to be handled. Himawari-8 real-time web is only one website that provides full-resolution remotely sensed images in real time. To reduce network traffic and increase the access speed of it from other countries out of Japan, mirror websites of each country are needed. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective mirroring system for the Himawari-8 real-time web. A mirroring model is introduced to avoid the problem of big data processing in the mirror websites. We adopt a file copy tool based on high-performance and flexible protocol (HpFP) to transfer meteorological satellite data from the Himawari-8 real-time web to the mirror websites. Our first target is Thailand, one of the most disaster-prone countries in South-East Asia. The mirror website is set up at an institution in Thailand connected via collaborative international networks, e.g., Japan Gigabit Network (JGN) and Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). The results show that the proposed mirroring system is able to overcome the big data issue by reducing the central processing unit (CPU) usage in the mirror website and transferring remotely sensed image files at high speed over international networks even under packet loss conditions. This suggests that our mirroring system has a potential for deployment in other Asian and Oceanian countries.