For the last several years, the National Weather Service (NWS) Systems Engineering Center (SEC) has been conducting proof-of-concept projects by developing prototypes of radar ingest and display systems using various Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radars that have weather channels. The most promising FAA system for use in NWS severe weather operations is the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR).

The TDWR is a FAA owned and operated meteorological surveillance radar with many attributes similar to the NWS network radars. Its high data resolution and rapid (one minute) base elevation scans make it an ideal complement to the Weather Surveillance Radar – 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D).

As an interim step toward deployment of a more permanent and robust data ingest system, the SEC deployed TDWR Web Servers to a number of NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs). Since then, the SEC has been working on creating a reusable Supplemental Products Generator (SPG), based on the WSR-88D Radar Product Generator (RPG), that will be capable of receiving and processing any non-NWS radar data stream. This paper will describe the engineering that was required to implement an SPG for TDWR and provide examples of successful interfacing with the NWS Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS).