AWIPS-2 in NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed: Implementation and Display of Experimental Datasets

NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) in Norman, Oklahoma provides an environment to evaluate new meteorological technologies and accelerate the more promising products from research-to-operations. The primary mission Experimental Warning Program (EWP) within the HWT is the assessment of severe weather research and technology to improve the Weather Forecast Office's (WFO) severe weather warnings for hail, wind, and tornadoes. Since 2008, the real-time display infrastructure for product evaluation was built around the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS-1). This platform provides forecasters with a familiar environment for data interrogation and allows for the seamless integration of experimental datasets for evaluation. In early 2012, the next iteration of the AWIPS software, called AWIPS-2, began rolling out to WFOs across the nation. With the software in an operational state, Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) along with the staff at the Norman WFO made the formal transition to AWIPS-2 in the HWT, developing a real-time system for the 2012 EWP Spring Experiment and the 2012 Phased Array Radar (PAR) Innovative Sensing Experiment (PARISE). The 2012 EWP AWIPS-2 real-time system provided a full suite of operational products flowing into a WFO along with the flexibility to choose any operate and issues warnings from any WFO in the nation. Within this framework, over 80 new products/datasets were evaluated during EWP 2012, including:

1. NSSL Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MR/MS) datasets

2. NSSL Three-Dimensional Variational Data Assimilation system (3DVAR) products

3. Synthetic Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R) series convective initiation, convective nearcasting, geostationary lightning mapper, and model derived satellite datasets

4. WFO Norman Weather Research and Forecasting (OUNWRF) model output

For PARISE 2012 a displaced AWIPS-2 real-time system was built, providing scientists with a repeatable testing environment for evaluating the impact of PAR data on the warning decision making process. To execute this, the NWS Radar Product Generator (RPG) software was expanded to handle the PAR Volume Coverage Patterns (VCPs) and finer resolution for a group of sample cases. The AWIPS-2 framework was also expanded to ingest and display the sub-minute volumes and non-standard elevation angles that are part of the PAR datasets.