In the early to mid-1990s, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) deployed the Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) with the Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Department of Defense (DOD). Since then 1000 ASOS have been deployed, mostly at airports. ASOS provides the Nation's surface observations for aviation operations, forecasts and warnings, and climate services. The ASOS program is in the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) phase with a product improvement program that focuses on sensor improvements.

ASOS is a modular system, designed to automatically collect, process, and archive weather sensor measurement data. Access to this data is available to a variety of users at local and remote locations on a 24-hour basis. The system configuration consists of a Data Collection Package (DCP) to collect and forward the sensor data to an Acquisition Control Unit (ACU). The ACU software processes the weather data, generates reports, archives data, and establishes the communications required to transfer data to external devices. The operating system and the software development tools are obsolete and no longer supported by the developer. Several key ASOS components are no longer supported by industry and the ACU processor boards are becoming increasingly difficult to support.

The immediate focus of the ASOS Sustainment Project is the implementation and testing of Engineering Development Models (EDM) at NOAA NWS, FAA, and DOD locations to demonstrate the performance of the ASOS with modern information technology. The ASOS Sustainment Project provides an opportunity for the participating agencies to improve IT security, conduct diagnostics and maintenance remotely, and provide a basis from which to address future requirements from the ASOS user community such as access to high-resolution observations supporting both expanded operations and research. This extended abstract will focus on how these future capabilities could advance the science of surface observing and improve the delivery of new products to the meteorological community.