AWIPS II represents the first phase of the AWIPS Technology Infusion project. During this phase, the AWIPS software infrastructure is updated to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) and River Forecast Centers (RFCs) AWIPS capabilities migrated into the new architecture. The migration is being conducted by Raytheon Technical Services Company (RTS) under the direction of the NWS Office of Science and Technology (OST) and is expected to be complete in 2009 with deployment targeted for 2010.

In order to achieve the deployment target, it is necessary for the NWS to take an active role in the software evaluation and migration of operations into the new infrastructure, including Independent Verification and Validation testing, User Functional Evaluation testing, security control testing, site migration (including local application and site configuration migration), Operational Test and Evaluation, and governance policy.

This paper reports the progress of these activities as they support the deployment of AWIPS II.