The U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC; see http://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/), located in Monterey, CA, is the lead activity within the U.S. Department of Defense for numerical weather prediction and coupled air-sea modeling. FNMOC fulfills this role through means of a suite of sophisticated global and regional meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) models, extending from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, which is supported by one of the world's most complete real-time METOC databases.

FNMOC has long been a leader in the Navy for the distribution of data and the development of applications designed to access, retrieve and display it. Most recently, FNMOC has been working on the development of a METOC Professional Portal in conjunction with the Navy Enterprise Portal (NEP). With the advent of the World Wide Web, a whole new avenue for the distribution of data became available. This great new capability inspired the Navy to create a single, integrated Web "desktop" in which all applications a sailor or marine needs to do their job are available from any workstation in the world. The Navy means to Web-enable the warrior, and the Navy Enterprise Portal is envisioned to do just that. Complementary with and in support of the NEP, the Navy's Task Force Web (TFW) envisions developing a Web Services Architecture for operational Navy use, by using Web Services as a means to provide opportunities for machines and fully-automated processes to access structured data in XML using Web protocols. XML provides a way to markup information without regard to presentation, and provide semantically meaningful content to another program or process over the Web. FNMOC is leading the development of a similar Web Services architecture for the METOC community. This will include a hosting environment and the METOC Professional Portal. The METOC Professional Portal will become a constituent portal under the NEP, as defined by the NEP constituent portal policy.

As part of Task Force Web, the Navy has established the Trident Warrior exercise program to demonstrate netcentric warfare capabilities. FNMOC has been fully engaged in this program, participating in Trident Warrior in 2003 and 2004, and leading the way by providing a means to demonstrate Web-enabled applications to the warfighter. During Trident Warrior ’03, FNMOC provided 5 of the 10 METOC applications via the NEP. Successful demonstrations of MyWxMap, Ballistic Winds (BALW), WebSAR, Weather Data Query (WDC) and Chemical Downwind Forecast (CDF) were carried out during the exercise, and the great success of these Web-enabled applications was recognized widely.

In Trident Warrior ’04, building on the success of Trident Warrior ’03, the BALW application will be taken to the next level of Web Services. BALW will be used to demonstrate the ability to provide METOC information directly to the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) mission planning system. BALW will produce real-time machine ingestible messages of METOC data that will be integrated into the AFATDS planner. This is a huge leap over the current manual methods, and will be a step toward realizing the Navy’s goal of Web-enabling the warrior.