Developing Case Studies for AWIPS

The Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMETâ) in collaboration with the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) has developed the capability to create case studies that can be displayed using AWIPS software. Raw data acquired from FSL, is converted into netCDF format for viewing of historical events. The COMET Program uses these AWIPS case studies to support residence training courses. Students attending COMET residence courses are able to view datasets in a software environment that closely resembles the one in which they work. Currently, only a few research sites have the software capability to display these data, but an effort toward rectifying this situation is underway.

Building these datasets presents several challenges. Transferring data consumes considerable amounts of time and disk space. This is a problem for case manipulation as well as storage on media. Cases must be localized to specific areas. If the case of interest moves out of this local area, a new localization must be included to cover the entire event. Processing the AWIPS data creates many extraneous files and directories that are removed to reduce case size. Additional datasets, such as radar and NOWRAD, may be added after the case is created.

The COMET Program is discontinuing the use of other applications in order to make D2D (Display Two Dimensions portion of AWIPS software) the only software used for case study display. This is being done to create an environment in the classroom that is consistent with the operational world.

Since the ability to view archived AWIPS data sets is lacking, the COMET Program has explored the use of FX-Net, developed at FSL, to provide remote viewing of these data using a web browser.

Presently there are seven AWIPS case studies available on the Web through the NWS/COMET Case Study Library (http://www.comet.ucar.edu/resources/cases/). Future cases will include AWIPS data as well as current formats that support GARP.