The National Weather Service (NWS) AWIPS is undergoing an extensive re-architecture and conversion to a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). A primary goal of the new architecture is to provide a software environment that meets the NWS continually growing mission requirements. This requires an adaptable system able to readily incorporate new data types and new science applications while providing scalability from a laptop computer to high performance clustered servers.

Raytheon Company is currently developing the new AWIPS SOA and is including several modern design constructs such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Staged Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA), XML canonical data models, plug-ins, and others. The reference architecture is an executable environment that provides an integrated development environment (IDE) and runtime environment created by the automated build and deploy processes.

This paper provides an overview of the conceptual architecture and design approaches being used. The paper also discusses the features and benefits provided by the new architecture.