December 8th, 2010

Great changes today

Published at 21:59. Filed under English version; 2 Comments

Sorry for a five-month silence, as I have to work with papers and exams -- they are essential to my future so I hope you can understand. But after all, I manage to get a week on 7Timer. Today I am glad to announce that great changes are ready, and this may be the most important upgrade for 7Timer since it borned in 2005.

First of all, I am happy to let you know that 7Timer finds a new home at Shanghai! You may recall that 7Timer was placed at Cosmostation in Beijing since it borned in 2005. Cosmostation is a server that kindly provided by the National Astronomical Observatories of China and maintained by Dr. Chenzhou Cui, to provide a free and stable web host for amateur astronomers in China. To-date, it has operated for almost nine years and served hundreds of amateur astronomers to build their own tiny home over Internet. However, as 7Timer is a bold creature, it eats up a lot of resources on Cosmostation, and I did occasionary feel sorry for Dr. Cui as well as other Cosmostation users about this over these years. This summer, Dr. Qing Lin and Mr. Haiming Tang from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, agree to provide a new server for 7Timer. The server is for operation of 7Timer only, so it is able to provide resources to conduct normal operation as well as some numerical astro-meteorlogical experiment, so today the transfer from Beijing to Shanghai is completed. I would like to express my big thankness to Dr. Cui for his long-term support of the 7Timer project, which is essential to the project's grow; to all users of Cosmostation for their supports; and to Dr. Lin and Mr. Tang for providing an excellent new server.

On the very first runs today, you may notice that 7Timer is times faster: the time it requires to perform a normal 384-hour package extraction and figure production is reduced from ~5-hour about one year ago to approximately 90 minutes. Also you may notice that the resolution is times higher: the resolution can be as high as 14km now, over one time higher than the old one (35km). The major part of this fantastic change is contributed by Mr. Johnson Lau (will be Dr. soon from Hong Kong, who also credited my deepest thankness. He spent days on writing an excellent distributed data processing system for 7Timer that enable the latter to process different kind of products almost in real-time with the data release at NCEP with ease, also he saves pretty much of my time by helping me on bug searches. Without Mr. Lau's effort, this fantastic change will not be possible, or at least will require me a pretty long time to do it. It is very fair to say that 7Timer benefits A LOT from his wonderful design!

Okay, I will summarize the new changes here. Ah, I am sorry that there are no new products (yeh, it is my word that there will be new product this year, but probably we have to wait until next year!) But I believe the changes below are exciting enough!

• Install a new data processing system, which significantly reduce data process time (from ~3h to ~1.5h).
• July's GFS model upgrade effective in 7Timer products, some forecast fields have resolution as high as 14km, including cloud cover, CWF, temperature, snow depth, and wind. High resolution forecast is extent to 192h; for forecast posted 192h, higher resolution forecasts are available (0.6deg or 1.0deg, comparing to the 2.5deg before today).
• New seeing model installed. The performance of the cloud cover forecast, as well as this new seeing model, is discussed on a paper that will be published on a scientific journal shortly (PASP, 123). For a preprint version, see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010arXiv1011.3863Y.
• ``Altitude correction'' function removed as study has shown that it does not have positive effect to improve the accuracy.
• Some other misc changes (bug fixing, etc).