TESS OPERATION AND PROGRAM PRODUCTS 

The TESS 2.1 system has three terminals, so it can be operated by up to three users at a time. When TESS is first entered, the TESS main menu is displayed. This menu allows the operator to select the category of application program to be run. TESS has nine categories of application programs: Analysis Utilities, Atmospheric Anal-ysis, Meteorology, Electromagnetic Propagation, Oceanography, Acoustics, Message Composing, Satellite Applications, and Briefing Support. We will discuss these categories and their individual program modules in the remainder of this lesson.

The TESS Analysis Utilities category is composed of the Solar/Lunar Almanac, Map Creation, Teletype Message Management, and Contour Digitization programs.

The Solar/Lunar Almanac Program (SLAP) produces monthly or daily summaries of ephemeral data for the Sun and Moon. These summaries include the times of sunrise and sunset and moonrise and moonset, the beginning and ending of civil and nautical twilights, the total daylight and daily illuminance, the phase of the Moon in percent illumination, the time and altitude of the Suns and the Moons meridional passage, and the hourly altitude and azimuth measurements for the Sun and the Moon.

The Map Creation program provides the capability to draw and store up to 10 Mercator, polar-stereographic, and Lambert Conformal maps for operator-designated areas. These maps can be used by programs such as Warnings Plot for display of processed data. Within the applica-tions, the operator can choose a map area and then "zoom-in" or "zoom-out" on a specific area of the map.

The Teletype Message Management (TMM) program receives and processes data input from the teletype interface. For shipboard TESS systems, four channels are provided for this information. One channel is dedicated to handling data received from the U.S. Navy Fleet Broad-cast, while the other three channels receive indigenous foreign or U.S. radioteletype broad-casts of environmental data. At shore sites, TESS interfaces with the local Meteorological and Environmental Data System (MEDS) input teletype data, which includes World Meteorological Organization (WMO) codes, Air-ways codes, Plain Language messages, and other bulletins. The Teletype Message Management program operates 24 hours a day processing all teletype data received. It also allows manual input of coded environmental observations. All incoming traffic is automatically sorted, with unwanted messages being directed to a temporary contingency file. Coded messages are checked for syntax errors, quality checked, and stored for later retrieval by other application programs or by the operator. Application programs requiring teletype data observations (stored in their coded formats) access appropriate decode utility programs in order to decode the necessary data fields.

The Contour Digitization program provides the capability to digitize facsimile charts or other analyses for display and for use as a first-guess field for the Weather Analysis program. Digitized contours are entered as arrays of latitude and longitude for the appropriate contour values via the digitizer and keyboard. The arrays are then made available for display and storage in the Environmental Data Files (EDF).

Privacy Statement - Press Release - Copyright Information. - Contact Us - Support Integrated Publishing