Mission Support System (MSS) development

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For making the optimal use out of the given flight hours in a HALO campaign, it is of utmost importance that the individual measurements flights are properly planned and that those plans can be communicated efficiently and iterated with the pilots and operating crew. From the year 2000 on, IEK-7 did build an expertise in model-based scientific flight planning with the goal to optimize the scientific outcome of research flights, while scientific questions to be answered by the flights were getting more complex.In 2010, the Mission Support System was developed by Marc Rautenhaus at DLR in collaboration with Jülich. This Python based approach offers great benefits over the previous ways of providing scientific information needed for flight planning. The MSS tool combines a dedicated flight planning tool to define a series of way points for the pilots with the ability to project the flight path on model data cross sections. MSS has been used for flight planning in various scientific aircraft campaigns beginning about in 2010 in which DLR was involved. Since the MSS Software is written under the Apache 2.0 Open Source Software License, it could be further developed with collaboration from Jülich to serve our needs for the planning of the POLSTRACC HALO campaign in 2016 with great success, employing now also CLaMS simulation forecasts, cirrus cloud forecasts by the model CLaMS-ice, and specially derived data products needed to visualize gravity wave activity. Since then, it was used extensively also by the EMERGE and WISE HALO campaigns. While the tool has undergone some improvements since 2010, no funding was granted dedicated to the general MSS development from any funding agency since 2010. Individual campaigns made available resources to address the immediate needs of the campaigns (such as setting up the campaign specific MSS servers or adding campaign dedicated visualization modes to the server), but no major improvements aside bug-fixing could be made through the part-time work of involved scientist.This project will support the further development of the MSS client and server in several sub-projects employing a trained programmer for one year since dedicating this amount of time is infeasible for the current developers. The resulting MSS version will be of great benefit for all upcoming HALO campaigns starting with the SouthTRAC. The new MSS will support the new and upcoming WMS mapping standards, allow for new and improved usage patterns, and have training materials available for new users and server administrators. Future and past campaign PIs are involved in the process to give advice with respect to what features will benefit the community the most.