Recent Advances in Product Availability Monitoring System (PAMS)

The Product Availability Monitoring System (PAMS) was developed by the Office of Systems Operations of the National Weather Service (NWS) to quantify the effectiveness of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) communication networks to deliver weather-related products from data sources to field sites, as well as from field sites to field sites. PAMS has been a powerful aid in previous NWS communication system test efforts, including the AWIPS Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E), AWIPS Commissioning, the Alphanumeric Backup Replacement System, and the Radar Product Central Collection/Distribution Service. The design of PAMS as well as the application of PAMS to various test and commissioning tasks were presented in previous American Meterological Society papers. This paper presents a new approach to data storage and analysis techniques for PAMS, in the near future, to process all weather products, across several data nodes, in a near real-time manner.