Automatic Text Generation and Weather Forecasting

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The Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE) is a software tool developed by the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. It uses both C and Python to provide assistance to weather forecasters, enhancing the forecast process and enabling new forms of digital forecast which are not possible without such software. Python is used heavily both in software creation and scripting of the software to provide automatically generated text products. Capacity for XML products is being developed which will enhance and standardise the products issues by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) in the future. Increased potential for geographic customisation is one advantage of such a system. The methods used for text generation and the challenges faced will be outlined, the strength of the open-source paradigm discussed, and the advantages of python highlighted.

Stream: Python

Paper: Automatic Text Generation and Weather Forecasting

Tennessee Leeuwenburg has worked in the computer science area since graduating in 2001. His work efforts have concentrated on information management, covering database, preparation and process aspects. He is currently employed to develop and extend the automatic generation of weather forecast text products from the next-generation forecasting tool, the "Graphical Forecast Editor". Immediately prior to this, he was working on the OpenDAP scientific data exchange protocol and object-oriented databases. He presented a paper on this topic to the Asia Pacific Advanced Computed '05 conference. He has also worked in electronic document management in a legal environment. His programming language of choice is Python.