Speedwell Environmental System v16

The Speedwell Environmental System v16

This post is of interest to our software clients and employees: the Speedwell Weather System v16 is landing soon and it has a new name: Speedwell Environmental System. Unlike my recent posts, this one is more personal. I will uncover what we have been doing internally and the technological hurdles we had to overcome these last 2 years.

So, let me start this post from about two years ago when Microsoft announced they were transitioning their core .Net technology stack to new paradigms. The .Net Framework became deprecated overnight. All C# developers, who until now relied on the excellent .Net Framework to produce their software, had to move their code base to .Net Standard, .Net Core, and .Net 6. Do not be fooled by the names, the .Net Framework 4.8 and .Net 6 technologies are not compatible. In my opinion, the migration is almost as difficult as migrating some code from say Python to C#. Every line of code must be reviewed, possibly rewritten, and tested. For website frontends, the rewrite is total. Unbeknownst to .Net Framework developers, dll hell is back with a vengeance. Our beloved Visual Studio has seen plenty of new features including the buggiest WinForm designer ever which crashes every 2 min when you are lucky. If you are a C# developer, Microsoft has published a new book on this migration topic.

Two years later, our migration mission task is almost accomplished. The migration of our services, backend, and desktop applications is 95% completed. Our website frontend code is however still untouched. The most painful thing to deal with was the death of WCF services. There are countless of articles on the internet where even Microsoft teams spent months and months migrating WCF services with the benefit at the end being a “CPU usage reduced by 50%”. Yes, months and months of work of large teams and the benefit is a reduction in usage of a $200 CPU - sigh.

Of the many software that runs 24-7 behind the scenes of Speedwell Climate, the Speedwell Environmental System, had to be migrated last. And now that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I would like to personally thank our key in-house developers: Dee Hipwell, Mark Elliott, Charles Hewett, and our dev team leader Ian Brookes. I am also grateful to our DataTeam for their patience with the developers. This introduction has been long enough, let me give everyone an update on where we are.

The next version of the Speedwell Environmental System (SES) is coming out within a month or so. It will be based on a mixture of .Net 6 and .Net Framework 4.8 technologies. This is because before flicking the switch and giving our clients the Desktop and the Data Manager compiled as .Net 6 applications we want to eat our own dog food at Speedwell by running the system ourselves internally first for a few months.

So, what has changed, what is coming?

-?????????Our Data and Forecast API have been migrated from WCF to WebAPI. We will be asking all our clients to start migrating their own code as soon as is practical.

-?????????Our Gridded Data API conversion from WCF to gRPC is almost completed. Again, all clients will have to migrate their code soon

-?????????All our internal tools: Forecast downscaler, data cleaner, data import and export platform, gridfusion, data recalibration, etc used by our DataTeam have been migrated

Speedwell Environmental System ? v16

-?????????The control panel, the event server, the automation server, the event viewer have all been migrated to .Net 6

-?????????The desktop has been migrated to .Net 6 and can now be compiled as either a .Net 6 or a .Net Framework application. It will be shipped to our clients as a .Net Framework 4.8 application this time around and as a .Net 6 application internally

-?????????The Data Manager is 95% compatible with .Net 6. Once the Gridded Data API is fully converted, the migration will be completed.

Hurricane Support

SES started to support hurricane data about 3 years ago. In SES v16 we have continued to improve our various screens relating to hurricanes. We will probably add support to hurricane contracts into the system soon in line with our expansion from weather to climate and environment.

High DPI monitor support

We have reviewed and improved all the screens for high DPI monitor support.

Dlls / Assemblies

If you use our DLLs/Assemblies, most of them are now .net standard 2.0 compatible which allows you to integrate them into either .Net Framework or .Net 6 applications.

Data Detrending Analysis screen

As a popular request, we have added support for hourly data on this screen too.

Monthly distribution of residues and a new annual daily volatility charts have been added.

New Pareto distribution

Supported for Alpha > 2 (ensures Mean and Variance exist)

New Marsaglia Random Number Generator

Because faster is better!

Daily Rainfall Simulation

Our rainfall simulation engine would sometimes fail when simulating snowfall – we had to improve this. So now you can use the rainfall simulation engine for simulating snowfall too.

And the usual security updates (SSH, SFTP, etc), general bug fixes, and other minor improvements.

Like everyone in the booming parametric insurance market, Speedwell Climate has been very busy. There are a few things I am omitting on the technological front; commercial disclosures will be announced soon. The main message is that with this migration mostly behind us, our development team’s hunger for innovation in the climate space is at an all-time high. As an example, we have started playing with Machine Learning algorithms to see how to integrate ML into our software and services. We do not do software development. We do R&D.

I would like to conclude this technical update by thanking our software clients. We have been licensing SES for over 22 years and your support throughout the years has been key. As always, this is your tool, we welcome all feedback, new suggestions, and improvements.

Speedwell Climate is the leading provider of data for the climate risk transfer business. We also provide the Speedwell Environmental System for pricing and managing climate derivative contracts. Speedwell Climate also provides independent valuations of weather derivatives, quanto pricing, and portfolios of climate risks.

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