The National Weather Service(NWS) intends to use the existing Radar Product Central Collection /Distribution Service (RPCCDS) to deliver the Weather Surveillance Radar-Doppler 1988 ( WSR-88D) Archive Level III products directly to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). These products have been delivered to the NCDC on magnetic storage media, which is an expensive, time-consuming, slow, and inefficient method. Using the RPCCDS to transmit these products to the NCDC will allow the WSR-88D sites to discontinue shipping magnetic storage media to NCDC, thereby resulting in a more timely, efficiently, and cost-saving operation. However, the impact of these new radar products on the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) Wide Area Network (WAN) and the current RPCCDS system must be determined prior to the official application of this new concept. The Product Availability Monitoring System (PAMS), developed by the NWS Office of Operational systems has been used to analyze the RPCCDS performance in the initial RPCCDS testing, deployment and has been used continuously for two years to monitor the communications data flow. PAMS will now be used to quantify the effect of the additional new radar products on the AWIPS WAN and the RPCCDS. The network performance over the last two years, prior to and after the inclusion of these new products will be analyzed and presented in this paper.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the National Weather Service.