Unidata AWIPS Update

UCAR’s Unidata Program Center continues to modify and redistribute the National Weather Service’s AWIPS build for the general public, with a focus on helping the needs of the University community. Unidata provides a public facing AWIPS EDEX data server on the NSF-funded Jetstream2 cloud. This EDEX instance serves real-time data to CAVE clients and allows users to use the python-awips to access, analyze, and plot data. The distributed architectural concepts of AWIPS allow for the ability to scale EDEX in the cloud to account for the desired data feeds (and size).

In addition to supporting Unidata’s current production version (18.2.1), the AWIPS team has also released a beta version (20.3.2) in the past year. The beta has several major dependency upgrades including Python (which is now entirely on Python3 instead of Python2) and Java (which migrated from Java8 to Java11).

The new beta for AWIPS is available as a CAVE download for three operating systems – RHEL 7-based Linux, Windows, and MacOS – and as a virtual machine, similar to the v18 production AWIPS. The backend server, EDEX, is available for installation on RHEL 7-based Linux machines. Updates, new features, and bug fixes to 20.3.2 are continually being incorporated in sub-releases.

For both the current production and beta versions of CAVE, the team has released new, fully encompassing installers for both Windows and MacOS. These installers mark a huge milestone in streamlining the software installation process and making it very user friendly.

The team continues to develop and support python-awips to be compatible with the latest versions of Python3. The AWIPS team has also worked to integrate the latest v20 code into the python-awips package, along with adding additional features outside of Raytheon development.

Aside from AWIPS development, the team is proud to have the first two Unidata online training modules in Learn AWIPS CAVE, and Learn Python-AWIPS. We also just completed two consecutive years of releasing AWIPS Tips blogs every other week. New this year, the AWIPS team is also hosting a student workshop during the AMS Student Conference.