NEXRAD Open Systems—Progress and Plans

The NEXRAD tri-agencies (Department of Commerce, National Weather Service; the Department of Defense, Air Force Weather Agency; the Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration) have established the NEXRAD Product Improvement (NPI) Program as a long-term activity to steadily improve WSR-88D science and technology. The NPI Program is managed and led by the NWS Office of Science and Technology, with individual NPI projects enlisting the participation and support of the other NEXRAD agencies. The NPI program has ongoing efforts to replace the Radar Data Acquisition, Radar Product Generation, and Principal User Processor subsystems with open systems compliant software and hardware. These system upgrades will enable the operational implementation of new scientific applications and signal processing techniques to improve the radar data quality. Further, the NPI program is currently working on the potential implementation of dual polarization, and on integration of weather data from several FAA radar systems. An additional NPI effort is focused on developing tools to improve the process of developing, testing, implementing and maintaining the software involved with functional enhancements to the WSR-88D. This paper describes the status of NPI ongoing projects and current planning for future projects.