Noaaport Broadcast System Processor

The Noaaport Broadcast System Processor (Nbsp) is a software suite for receiving, processing and distributing the contents of the NOAAPORT weather data stream. (The NOAAPORT broadcast system provides a one-way broadcast communication of NOAA environmental data and information in near real time to NOAA and external users. This broadcast service is implemented by a commercial provider of satellite communications utilizing C-band.)

The core module of Nbsp receives and unpacks the NOAAPORT data fragments, and stores the complete reassembled files in a ready-to-use format on a local disk. The files can then be processed further for particular applications.

Nbsp includes a built-in Tclhttpd web server for re-broadcasting NOAAPORT data over the World-Wide Web. The University of Puerto Rico maintains a reference Nbsp implementation whose publicly-accessible Tclhttpd server manages an average of over 100 Mb of throughput per minute [L1 ].

Nbsp takes its orders from a main configuration file and from various run control scripts at different stages. They are written in Tcl.

The Nbsp project includes several libraries for post-processing of weather data, including:

TclGrads

a library of procedures for executing commands in GrADS (Grid Analysis and Display System) from a Tcl script.

TclGempak

a library of procedures for executing Gempak programs from a Tcl script.

TclMetar

a library of Tcl procedures for decoding Metar reports from a Tcl script.

Tclssh

a package of pure Tcl functions for executing Tcl scripts in a remote host. It is used by Nbsp to offload some long-running jobs in parallel to other computers.