An unnamed base of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) developed and installed the "three oceans realtime integrated meteorological protection system", which was a project under the manned space program, on the entire fleet of four Yuanwang tracking vessels.

These vessels are dispatched to the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans to track China's space missions, particularly the manned spaceflights.

In the past each tracking vessel had to rely on localized meteorological information collected from on board equipment. The lack of synoptic meteorological information offered limited safety protection to the tracking vessels from approaching severe weather systems, which could significantly affect spaceflight tracking operations.

With increasing number of space launches, especially in the manned space program, there is a demand of an integrated ground- and space-based realtime meteorological information network for the tracking fleet.

The equipment unit of the unspecified PLA base spent the past six year to design and develop the reliable integrated weather info network using advanced scientific and technological tools.

To generate a synopsis, a PLA-written software program automatically collects numerical data from all the tracking vessels, domestic military bases and meteorological centres, and plots the "three oceans [Pacific, Atlantic and Indian] tropical weather charts". These charts and other meteorological information are transmitted to each tracking vessel as soon as they become available.

The State certification committee recognized that such a network would fulfill the shortfall in using existing meteorological charts from Asian and European sources for spaceflight tracking, and advance China's marine meteorology in the three oceans.

The system was tested successfully in the maiden flight of Shenzhou in November 1999 and in the launches of Zhongxing-22 comsat in January and Fengyun-2B metsat in June this year.

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