The Remote Atmospheric Probing Information Display (RAPID) system

The RAPID system has been developed to support short term forecasting of cloud and precipitation. RAPID was developed with the philosophy that the system should be easily maintained, user-friendly, yet powerful enough to perform both the analysis or radar and satellite data and generation of forecasts in real-time. The two major hardware components are a VAX host computer and an ADAGE RDS-3000 image processor. The RAPID user environment is structured to encourage user participation. Numerous standardization procedures are employed: a functional disk organization, standardized data and source file headers, extensive file documentation, and use of user developed RAPID tools, libraries of often used routines. Data management has been designed to maximize the potential for real time capability. Radar and satellite data are preprocessed on other computers before ingestion into RAPID. The bulk of these data and derived products are stored, and analysis and display are performed entirely within, the image processor.