MESSIR systems are now operational at the Jordanian National Forecasting Centre following a two-month installation by COROBOR engineers at the beginning of the year.
The Jordanian site is one of COROBOR's largest so far and represents another significant COROBOR achievement in Jordan after the installation, in May 1997, of a MESSIR-AFTN message switching system at the Amman Marka Airport.
It is the result of an open tender issued at the end of 1998 to enhance the country's forecasting capabilities and upgrade meteorological telecommunications to European Standards.
The Jordanian Meteorological Department opted for the purchase of MESSIR-COMM as message switching system and 11 MESSIR-VISION as forecaster workstations.
Five of these MESSIR-VISION were installed at the National forecasting Centre, two at the Queen Alia and Amman Airports, and four at the regional centres of Mafraq, Safawi, Azraq, and El Jafer.
One MESSIR-VISION has been integrated into an MDD reception system to serve as back up for data reception in case of a RETIM failure.
MESSIR-VISION will give forecasters the ability to read and display data coming from existing meteorological models, plot this data on tracing tables (AO printers), scan bulletins written in Arabic and send them to end-users, visualise satellite images coming from various sources and overlay them on all sorts of meteorological parameters (wind, temperature,…).

Telecommunications have also been vastly improved.
MESSIR-COMM is handling connections to four satellite reception systems : RETIM (1 and 3), MDD, TECNAVIA (reception of METEOSAT images), and HRPT (for images coming from the NOAA).
MESSIR-COMM is also handling a connection to Offenbach (Germany) via RMDCN for the reception and transmission of forecasts and OPMET data.
The Jordanian meteorologists will also soon benefit from the new MESSIR-MEDIA system dedicated to the production of meteorological images for media.
MESSIR-MEDIA will be installed at the National Forecasting Centre to be used by forecasters for the preparation of read-to-use charts for TV companies.
MESSIR in Jordan is also connected to a RAID server with four 9 giga hard disks for the archiving of the meteorological data received for climatological purposes.