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22 Chapter 1 Introduction

«system» «system»
Weather Station Data Management
and Archiving

«system»
Figure 1.7 The weather Station Maintenance
station’s environment

system. Some mental illnesses cause patients to become suicidal or a danger to other
people. Wherever possible, the system should warn medical staff about potentially sui-
cidal or dangerous patients.
The overall design of the system has to take into account privacy and safety
requirements. The system must be available when needed otherwise safety may be
compromised and it may be impossible to prescribe the correct medication to patients.
There is a potential conflict here—privacy is easiest to maintain when there is only a
single copy of the system data. However, to ensure availability in the event of server
failure or when disconnected from a network, multiple copies of the data should be
maintained. I discuss the trade-offs between these requirements in later chapters.

1.3.3 A wilderness weather station

To help monitor climate change and to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts in
remote areas, the government of a country with large areas of wilderness decides to
deploy several hundred weather stations in remote areas. These weather stations col-
lect data from a set of instruments that measure temperature and pressure, sunshine,
rainfall, wind speed, and wind direction.
Wilderness weather stations are part of a larger system (Figure 1.7), which is a
weather information system that collects data from weather stations and makes it
available to other systems for processing. The systems in Figure 1.7 are:

1. The weather station system This is responsible for collecting weather data,
carrying out some initial data processing, and transmitting it to the data manage-
ment system.

2. The data management and archiving system This system collects the data from
all of the wilderness weather stations, carries out data processing and analysis,
and archives the data in a form that can be retrieved by other systems, such as
weather forecasting systems.
3. The station maintenance system This system can communicate by satellite
with all wilderness weather stations to monitor the health of these systems and
provide reports of problems. It can update the embedded software in these
systems. In the event of system problems, this system can also be used to
remotely control a wilderness weather system.