Aviation Weather Center Web Experience with Cloud, Mobile First, and Accelerated Testbed Prototyping

The National Weather Service (NWS) Aviation Weather Center (AWC) provides domestic and international aviation weather forecasts and warnings, disseminated through traditional product dissemination as well as directly to end users through AviationWeather.gov. The web site has undergone a complete rewrite, in order to both modernize and improve consistency. As part of this effort, AWC looked to take advantage of newer technologies including cloud computing and mobile responsible displays.

The primary display of data is through an interactive maps, known as the Graphical Forecasts for Aviation (GFA), first developed as a replacement for the traditional text Area Forecast, and now spans a wide variety of weather information in a one stop Geographic Information Systems (GIS) interactive web framework. The new, more flexible framework also allows much deeper customizability, providing an ideal platform for testbed evaluations. The Aviation Weather Testbed (AWT) quickly took advantage of the new tools available for comparisons of upcoming Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) model data against observations and existing model data sets, and it has become integral to spinning up new evaluations while minimizing time spent creating routine visualizations.

This presentation will discuss some of the newer technologies used, major design components of the site, and examples of how it became integral to quickly demonstrating new products.