New AWIPS Fundamentals Course for Incoming NWS Forecasters

To better support newly hired operational forecasters in the National Weather Service (NWS), the NWS Warning Decision Training Division (WDTD) is currently developing and expected to launch a new Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) Fundamentals course over the next year. Previously, AWIPS Fundamentals has been included in the Radar and Applications Course (RAC) taken by all new NWS forecasters to prepare them for warning operations. However, many forecasters are unable to join a RAC class until months into their job, during which time they would be using AWIPS without formal training. The new standalone AWIPS Fundamentals course will enable incoming forecasters to start formal AWIPS training at the discretion of their local training officer, potentially as early as their first week on the job.

The AWIPS Fundamentals course will feature an enhanced VLab applet and updated jobsheets. Students will follow along with re-recorded video demonstrations on a cloud instance containing AWIPS. Rather than a convective case simulated on the Weather Event Simulator (WES), there will be a new static case with no WES. This will allow the AWIPS software and training to remain current with each new build release. Forecasters will utilize WDTD’s Cloud Automated Scheduler (CLAS) webpage to schedule and launch their training cloud instances.

The modular design of the AWIPS Fundamentals course facilitates updating the software and training as new AWIPS builds are released. WDTD is exploring the possibility of extending this course, or its components, to additional groups of AWIPS practitioners and evaluating the use of these components as references for current forecasters.