25 years of contributing to NinJo

25 years. One weather workstation. Five organisations, four countries and countless forecasts.

In 2001, a small team from ask – Innovative Visualisierungslösungen GmbH contributed the first lines of code to an ambitious international project: NinJo, the meteorological workstation of Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and its partners. Our first contribution was the Graphical Object Factory (GOF), a 2D/3D graphics framework built on Java 2D and OpenGL. A quarter of a century later, with a bigger team and many more responsibilities, we are still at the heart of the system.

NinJo is owned and used by the national weather services of Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Canada and by the Bundeswehr Geoinformation Service. It is a client-server system written entirely in Java, with a modular and scalable design. Meteorologists combine as many layers as they need in one scene: surface observations, model fields, satellite and radar data, lightning, storm cells, soundings, aviation reports and more. All layers are synchronised in time and can be animated at any zoom level, and visualisations are generated on request, so they are always up to date. Meteograms and cross-sections complement the maps. Forecasters draw their own analyses and issue warnings, while NinJo Batch generates forecast products fully automatically. In 2018, the consortium received the Technology Achievement Award of the European Meteorological Society.

What we contribute to

• The 2D and 3D graphics rendering core that turns meteorological data into maps, layers and animations
• The Aviation Layer, which shows SIGMETs, TAFs and other reports and data on maps and along a planned flight path
• The GeoVector Layer and Map Projection Framework, which handle all geographic point and vector data, including clipping, in user-selected map projections
• The Appearance Framework, which controls the colour coding of all weather model parameters and remote sensing data
• NinJo 3D, with volumetric rendering using ray casting and isosurfaces
• The GAFOR Tool for editing general aviation forecasts
• The Batch Test System (BTS), which runs extensive automated tests before every NinJo release

And the story continues

The directors of the five consortium members have launched a modernisation programme to carry NinJo into the coming decades, as a forecaster workstation and as a service platform for weather and climate products. We look forward to continuing our contribution as a subcontractor to EBP Deutschland GmbH.

Thank you to DWD, EBP and all our partners for 25 years of trust and teamwork. Here’s to the next 25!

More about our work on NinJo: NinJo – forecaster workstation system.

Images: © Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD)