Taking AWIPS to the Next Level: Expanding Beyond Today's Observations to Innovate Weather, Water, and Climate Applications

The Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) is used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS) to ingest, analyze and disseminate operational weather data including time-sensitive, high-impact warnings. AWIPS plays a critical role in the ability of U.S. forecasters to make weather predictions that can save lives and safeguard property. It provides a re-usable set of services that ingest and integrate meteorological, hydrological, satellite, and radar data. Forecasters at more than 130 weather forecast offices and river forecast centers across the nation utilize the capabilities of AWIPS to make increasingly accurate weather, water, and climate predictions, and to dispense rapid, highly reliable warnings and advisories.

NOAA/NWS and Raytheon are currently deploying the system's next-generation software, AWIPS II – the AWIPS of the Future. As of mid-August 2012, AWIPS II has been installed at 32 sites and is currently operational at five NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs), one River Forecast Center (RFC), six Regional HQs and four National Centers. AWIPS II, built on a Service Oriented Architecture, is bringing advanced functionality to forecasters in the field. Key attributes include: • Plug-and-play adaptable to a variety of data types • Easily accommodates new systems and applications • Scalable from laptop to servers • Expandable into a distributed, community-wide research-to-operations testbed for weather, hydrology, ocean, and climate applications • Non-proprietary software with dependencies only on leading open source packages • High performance data services using advanced data serialization techniques to enable gaming style interaction with dynamic data updates • Situational awareness and decision-making visualization that is very adaptable and can perform GIS projections of all data faster than any commercial system • Visualization that is customizable at the base/site/user level through XML files and scripts that give users a completely tailored view of the data • Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with functionality and utility recognizable across academia, government, and industry • Warnings and reports done quickly through GIS interactions and automated text generation using a template engine

With advanced products from NOAA's new Soumi-NPP/JPSS-1 and GOES-R observatories coming on line within the next several years, the nation's investment in these powerful observing systems will only be fully realized through proactive bidirectional collaboration across the research and operational communities. AWIPS II provides the scientific and computational conduit through which research and development can facilitate collaborations to further the use and purpose of these important space-based resources. This presentation builds on important progress to date to suggest a comprehensive roadmap that engages the diverse and multi-disciplinary research and operations enterprise into an integrated community-wide research-to-operations applications testbed to facilitate development and deployment of new weather, hydrology, ocean, and climate applications.