The Construction of an AWIPS Software Demonstration System for the NWS Spaceflight Meteorology Group

Abstract

The Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) is the National Weather Service’s (NWS) meteorological application and display system being deployed by the NWS at over 130 NWS field offices and river forecast centers across to the US to replace their aging AFOS and WSR-88D Principal User Processors. AWIPS provides meteorologists with the ability to overlay and interact with high resolution satellite and radar imagery, surface and upper air data, and numerical model grids. AWIPS revolutionizes the way that forecasters view their data as the NWS modernization program moves in to the next century.

The NWS Spaceflight Meteorology Group, (SMG), is located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. SMG relies on its own Meteorological Interactive Data Display System, (MIDDS), used to support space shuttle operations. SMG also has an AFOS and a WSR-88D PUP to supplement the MIDDS. In the mid-1990’s SMG went through a multi-staged evolution to migrate the MIDDS from a mainframe platform to a distributed network of UNIX workstations. Since the early 1990s, SMG has closely followed the progress of the AWIPS program and provided many requirements for the design phase of the "National Center AWIPS". Until the Congressionally imposed budget ceiling in FY1998-99, SMG was on the national deployment schedule for AWIPS. Due to NWS budget limitations and the lack of a National Center AWIPS capable of displaying data for overseas locations, SMG was removed from the deployment schedule. In lieu of a full AWIPS, the AWIPS Program Office provided SMG with a NOAAPort Receive System, four surplus HP-755 workstations, and a tape containing the executable and source code for AWIPS Build 4.2.

SMG is building it’s AWIPS demonstration system to test the NRS data channels prior to using them operationally, and to experiment with the capabilities of the AWIPS D-2D software. Both D-2D and the SMG MIDDS system incorporate the TclTk programming language for Graphical User Interface design, and many parts of D-2D may be eventually ported in to the MIDDS. This paper will describe SMG’s efforts to build an AWIPS demonstration system using the components provided by the AWIPS Program Office.