Exploring the Future of Product Production in Hazard Services at the Aviation Weather Center

As a part of the national National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) milestone, the Aviation Weather Center has been working to transition operations onto the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System II (AWIPS-2) system. The NCEP milestone focus has remained on porting the functionality of the National Centers version of AWIPS (N-AWIPS) into AWIPS in order to be prepared for the shift to the AWIPS cloud framework prior to 2030. In parallel to this effort, the AWC has also been exploring Hazard Services for Aviation, a new product production platform within AWIPS-2. While the current NCEP milestone has had success in porting current functionality via PGEN, Hazard Services is being built with the goal of improving and increasing efficiency of product production.

The legacy PGEN platform was originally designed for N-AWIPS, which was integrated into NCEP in the early 90s. Advanced technology in its prime, the evolution of AWC operations throughout the years slowly grew into and then became bound by the framework of that software. Hazard Services has provided a new and very adaptable framework and thus the opportunity for a deep dive into AWC’s current product production process and the potential for improvement and increased efficiency. In addition, it also opens the door for closer partnerships with all aviation metwatch offices in the National Weather Service by establishing one common, collaboration friendly framework for product production. Together with the Alaska Aviation Weather Unit (AAWU), the Hawaii Forecast Office (HFO), and the Global Systems Laboratory (GSL), AWC has begun exploring the potential of aviation operations inside of Hazard Services. An update on this work and specific development of AWC products will be presented.