The Centralized Atmospheric Analysis and Prediction System (CAAPS)

The Navy has, over the past several years, designed and developed a high-resolution, on-demand, short-term, numerical weather prediction capability for use by military forces in the field from anywhere in the world. The latest iteration of this capability is a Web-based system known as the Centralized Atmospheric Analysis and Prediction System (CAAPS). CAAPS executes the Navy's Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS®) at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) in a manner defined by the user in the field. A graphical user interface (GUI) permits military forces worldwide, wherever they may be located, to specify, remotely configure and schedule a COAMPS ® model run for their geographical area of interest. The computer hardware and software required for CAAPS are centrally located at FNMOC and accessed via reachback over the Web rather than being forward-deployed to the Navy's regional weather-prediction centers, as was the case for the CAAPS predecessor, the Distributed Atmospheric Mesoscale Prediction System (DAMPS). The CAAPS configuration at FNMOC, which employs a state-of-the-art IBM Linux PC cluster, eliminates the burden of DAMPS system administration and maintenance at user sites, which was problematic. At the same time, however, CAAPS provides the user complete flexibility to choose areas of operational interest and quickly obtain high-resolution analysis and forecast gridded data fields. These fields can then be used to create locally tailored mission-specific forecasts, and as input to computer-generated tactical decision aids that influence crucial military decisions and actions dependent on weather.