Initial Deployment of the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar Supplemental Product Generator for NWS Operations

For several years, the National Weather Service (NWS) Systems Engineering Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, has been developing and prototyping a capability to bring FAA radar weather data into Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs). In mid 2005, that capability was realized with the first round of deployment of the Supplemental Product Generator (SPG). The SPG is a standard NWS Radar Product Generator (RPG) that has been modified to accept the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) data stream. Incoming radials are translated into the NWS (WSR-88D) Doppler radar format and used to create a number of base products. The products are then transmitted to WFO Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) consoles for interrogation, display and interrogation as if they were in the native NWS radar format.

This paper will describe the completion of the engineering of the SPG, the products that are being generated and the locations of the system's initial deployment.