The National Weather Service Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) is located at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. The SMG provides weather support to NASA for all human spaceflight operations. This mission requires the use of a meteorological analysis and display system capable of displaying global weather data on scales ranging from the synoptic down to the mesoscale level for any given location around the world.

In June 2000, the NWS delivered a WFO AWIPS to SMG. The SMG AWIPS was initially localized for the Houston area, and was only useful for providing local weather support to the JSC community. Since the AWIPS delivery last summer, the SMG Techniques Development Unit has devoted much of its time towards expanding the default display capabilities of AWIPS, and evaluating the best method of integrating AWIPS with SMG's existing McIDAS based weather display system. In addition to receiving data from all four Satellite Broadcast Network channels, the SMG AWIPS is ingesting local data sets that include mesonet data from the three CONUS shuttle landing sites, Meteosat 7 satellite data, and Spanish radar data. The project of expanding the SMG AWIPS to be a global forecast system is not complete, however it can now be used to forecast for the primary shuttle landing facilities in the CONUS, Europe, and Northern Africa.

This paper describes the steps that SMG had to take to modify its AWIPS from a system designed to support a local NWS office, towards a system capable of providing global coverage. This paper also discusses the advantages and limitations that SMG has found with the existing AWIPS configuration.