NSF 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).

The Unidata AWIPS team is continually working on staying up to date with the latest versions of AWIPS. With RHEL/CentOS7 end of life being June 30, 2024 and the delay in the NWS releasing version 23.4.1 we had to release a beta only version of 23 to our users. The v23 beta version runs on RHEL/Rocky8 with python 3.11 and Java11. By the end of the year a new version of AWIPS should be released with Java being upgraded to version 17.

Unidata AWIPS CAVE is available for Rocky8-based Linux, Windows, and MacOS as well as a virtual machine. The backend server, EDEX, is available on Rocky8-based Linux machines. Updates, new features, and bug fixes are continually being incorporated in sub-releases. Updates are also incorporated into python-awips which is available on all three operating systems.

Due to downsizing of the AWIPS team, the AWIPS Tips blog series has taken a bit of a hiatus, however all previous blogs are accessible here. There are still two online training modules: Learn AWIPS CAVE and Learn Python-AWIPS as well as the AWIPS Manual available to the public.