Real-time knowledge of the weather is critical to naval activities (undersea, surface, and air) in the blue-water and littoral theaters. Typically, shore-based installations have access to weather radar information, while at-sea elements often lack real-time weather information for operational planning. The Navy is currently addressing this missing capability by developing the SPS-48E Weather Upgrade and the SPY-1 Tactical Environmental Processor. However, many other weather radars (both commercial and government) often utilize custom software and hardware processing systems. These custom systems were necessary at the time of their development in order to perform complex radar processing in a timely manner. Many of the algorithms executed in these custom processors are generally used in almost any weather radar; examples of these are pulse pair processing, single-pulse reflectivity estimation, spectral (pulsed Doppler) processing, pulse compression, velocity/range folding correction, and surface clutter filtering. Other algorithms, such as beam steering for phased array systems, are typically unique to the radar platform and may not be appropriate algorithms for development as generic processing blocks.

With the rapid advances in commercial personal computer (PC) technology, the off-the-shelf computer systems found in today's businesses and homes often outperform, by several orders of magnitude, the custom processors in legacy radar systems while providing significantly reduced platform costs. The low-level assembly code for these processors can now be replaced with high-level code running optimized vector processing functions for a fraction of the cost of custom hardware, software, and/or firmware. In addition, the commonality of these processing routines allows for modular software that can be applied to many different radar systems with limited modification of the software. A modular processing architecture which combines interface drivers, processing algorithms, and display utilities will provide the Navy and other armed forces, as well as government agencies (e.g., the Coast Guard and the FAA), with a high performance processing toolset that can be applied to many different radar systems. This Modular Software Architecture (MSA) can provide low-cost adjunct weather processing capability to tactical radars, which is a concept that has been proven in the ship-borne SPS-48E and SPY-1 weather programs, and the ground-based MPQ-64 weather program.

One of the greatest benefits of the MSA is that it is an open weather radar processing toolbox that can be used by various Government agencies, research organizations such as the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and the National Corporation for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), universities, and private companies for weather radar research and development. The extensible MSA allows various end-users and developers to add functions to this toolbox, allowing for an ever-increasing capability that can leveraged by all the MSA users.

The Modular Software Architecture (MSA) provides a common framework and corresponding individual algorithm building blocks of a software processing toolset for weather radars. The advantages of a common framework include the ability to use common algorithms and functions in multiple different weather radar applications, without redeveloping the same basic algorithm for each target platform. In this way, the MSA reduces total ownership cost for multiple systems by reducing the non-recurring engineering design across similar programs. Modular design also provides a clean method to insert or remove algorithms within a processing stream without restructuring or breaking the underlying application.