The Evolution of AWIPS

NOAA's National Weather Service has been using the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) technology in its forecast offices since 1997. AWIPS has been a sound platform for conducting operations, but the increased operational demands are stressing the system in a manner that can not be accommodated by the original software and communications architecture. Higher resolution numerical model guidance, increased resolution and number of remote sensing products from NEXRAD and satellite systems, and introduction of digital forecast products have all contributed to the need for more processing, communications, and display power.

While the hardware architecture has been updated with the completion of the migration to Linux and commodity platforms, the software architecture of AWIPS has not changed fundamentally since AWIPS was first deployed. This architecture is becoming increasingly harder to maintain and adds cost to the infusion of new science into the system.

AWIPS is going to evolve towards a modern network oriented architecture and will take advantage of proven industry standards. As part of this, the visualization and data distribution paradigms are going to evolve to fit this new overall architecture. This paper defines the overall plan, schedule and vision for the evolution of AWIPS.