NEXRAD Open Systems - Progress and Plans

The evolution of the WSR-88D system to open systems is continuing under the NEXRAD Product Improvement (NPI) Program. The NEXRAD tri-agencies have established the NPI Program as a long-term sub-activity of the overall NEXRAD Program. The NPI Program Management is led by the NWS Office of Systems Development, with individual NPI projects enlisting the participation and support of all of the NEXRAD tri-agencies. Currently within its fifth year, the NPI program has ongoing efforts to replace the Radar Data Acquisition, Radar Product Generation, and Principal User Position subsystems. Further, the NPI program is currently working on an implementation of dual polarization and integration of weather data from several FAA radar systems. This paper describes the status of these ongoing efforts.

With the deployment of the Open RPG to begin in early 2000, the tri-agencies are now planning improved methods of maintaining and enhancing the functionality offered. Software maintenance and enhancement methods utilizing computer assisted programming tools, application programming interfaces, and standard practices and procedures are being planned. Issues being considered include to what extent can we and should we promote compatibility across different systems' software maintenance activities (e.g., WSR-88D and AWIPS), and how can we promote efficiency in the transfer of applications from research and scientific development environments (e.g., Laboratories) into the operational baseline? Further, the agencies are assessing the potential of utilizing meteorological data from other government systems directly into the WSR-88D processing subsystem. Other sources of data might include AWIPS, and meteorological data from FAA radars (e.g., the TDWR, ASR-9/11 and the ARSR-4).