Access to data and information is critical to the ability of the operational personnel to support the mission of the NWS. The amount of data provided to and used by the forecaster is rapidly increasing. This growth of data volume is due to improved higher resolution numerical weather prediction models, the need to access model ensemble members to support the creation of uncertainty products, and the addition of new and enhanced data associated with GOES-R, National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and radar systems. Many of these areas of data growth are not accounted for within the existing requirements baseline of AWIPS and the existing data distribution and data access infrastructure. As a result, AWIPS infrastructure must be enhanced to more effectively and efficiently deal with increasing data needs and resultant forecaster data access requirements. The enhanced data delivery infrastructure is being developed to meet robust operational requirements including performance, availability, security and system failure recovery metrics.

To meet the objectives of the Data Delivery project, the following types of capabilities are being explored:

• Data registry services that will provide a means to publish data sources and metadata information and allow for the introduction of new data services.

• Data discovery services that will provide for a system that can discover datasets and necessary associated metadata, e.g., Extensible Markup Language (XML) schemas, needed to access those datasets.

• “Smart” push/pull technologies that will provide the means to subset the data by user selectable field value, time, space, ensemble member, etc. Such data set filtering will be done on an ad-hoc user request basis or in a pre-defined way where particular data subsets are known based upon upcoming weather.

The Global Systems Division (GSD) has developed a series of prototypes beginning in April, 2010, as proofs-of-concept for these capabilities. The prototype systems enable clients to either discover datasets by querying a registry/repository (reg/rep) and requesting data from a registered data server, or to request datasets directly from a web-enabled remote data server. Three types of data can be requested – model data (grids) from Web Coverage Services (WCS) data providers; METAR observations from Web Feature Services (WFS) servers; and MADIS observations from a GSD generated JMBL-MADIS server. Gridded data are displayed on the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE) GUI via the Product Browser, while the observation data are displayed via the CAVE plan-view displays in the form of station plots. On the Product Browser, the menus are dynamic, enabling previously unknown datasets to be displayed, while on the Volume Browser, the datasets are known a-priori and menus are fixed. The data discovery, request and display capabilities are carried out by CAVE plugins.

The Data Delivery system handles data in three formats – NetCDF-3 and NetCDF-4, JMBL XML, and Weather Information Exchange Model (WXXM). All data are ingested and stored in the HDF5 format by EDEX plugins for display on CAVE.

GSD is continuing to extend the capabilities of the Data Delivery system by providing the requested data to perspectives other than the D2D perspective. The purpose is to make the data available to other applications such as GFE, IHIS, Hydrology, etc. for display in their respective perspectives. In addition, as the prototypes continue to be developed, existing functionality is refined to provide cleaner interfaces and improved performance. Since GSD is developing proofs-of-concept based on Data Delivery requirements, the prototypes are being handed off to the NWS contractor, Raytheon for development of the operational system.