The meteorological information system at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute

The Alfred-Wegener-Institute operates regularly three meteorological stations, an observatory in Antarctica (Neumayer, 70S, 8W), another observatory in the Arctic (Koldewey, 79N, 12E) and a ship station on board of the research ice-breaker POLARSTERN. At Neumayer, the routine observatory programs started in 1981, at Koldewey in 1990, and on board of POLARSTERN in 1982. The observatory programs consist mainly of routine synoptic surface observations, daily upper-air soundings, as well as surface radiation and mast measurements. All data from these programs are stored in the Meteorological Information System at the Atfred-Wegener-Institute, called MISAWI.MISAWI is based on a relational database (Sybase) in a client server environment. A variety of data-validation procedures, triggers, views and external programs are implemented to optimize the data quality and data integrity. Several tools offer routine export functions for users without SQL-knowledge. Additionally, an interface to the World Wide Web gives anybody free and direct access to certain data subsets.