The Weather Archive and Visualization Environment (WAVE) Project

The National Weather Service (NWS) is collaborating with NOAA Global Systems Division (GSD) to develop a modern, lightweight, scalable application with capabilities to meet the growing demand to communicate probabilistic information in a timely and understandable format. This tool is the Weather Archive and Visualization Environment (WAVE), a web-based graphical interface conceived by NWS forecasters to:

• Perform Impact-based Decision Support Services (IDSS)
• Perform day-to-day forecasting duties involving new and/or experimental data sets
• Review archived meteorological data in a case-study fashion
• Enhance training opportunities

WAVE’s software architecture has been designed to fully utilize a scalable cloud infrastructure. In addition, the underlying APIs allow users to customize how they present WAVE data. One such use is embedding WAVE URLs into PowerPoint to automatically retrieve an animated image of the latest run for a selected model. WAVE also supports high-resolution datasets such as GOES-16, complex probabilistic data such as NBM, and high velocity data such as RADAR. WAVE’s cloud-based architecture allows it to continue to grow with the data and produce timely, meaningful insights from increasingly complex data.