Since 2000, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), in cooperation with the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory, has been developing the Forecaster's Analysis System (FAS), an AWIPS-like forecaster workstation. The purpose of this project is to develop a system that can easily analyze all weather information by overlaying, combining, and animating it in a single display, so forecasters can focus on the weather event itself and reduce the overall preparation time. With implementation of the FAS, Korea became the third country in the world (next to Taiwan) to use the AWIPS system for operational purposes.

During the first 2-year development, AWIPS has been successfully installed and is running semi-operationally at the KMA forecast office. FAS is now fully running on the Linux platform (including data server and user workstations) and receives all observational data and operational numerical model outputs in the KMA. The system will be deployed at 6 Regional Offices in July 2002 and at 37 Weather Stations in 2003.

From the beginning, the KMA planned to change the U.S. environment-such as English units (mi, ft, in, kt, etc.) and the English menu-into appropriate format used in Korea. (Taiwan still uses the U.S. environment.) During the 2002 development period, the English units have been replaced with universal MKS units (km, m, cm, m s-1, etc.), and the menu has been changed from English to Korean.

Because of their usefulness, units on the skewT-logP display and the interactive skewT-logP analysis tool were the first to be converted to MKS units. Unit conversion on the radar display will follow.

The workstation user interface was developed using the Tcl command language and Tk tool kit. Any version of Tcl/Tk since October 1999 supports Unicode (multibyte language, such as the 2-byte Asian fonts) and thus allowed us to have the Korean menu on the user interface, which had been impossible before. We needed to make some modification in the C++ code not to lose Unicode information during communicating with Tcl scripts.

From the U.S.'s point of view, this internationalization could make the AWIPS system easily accessible for any country in the world, and from Korea's point of view, AWIPS has now been successfully implemented in a format suitable for KMA's forecasting needs.

The operational FAS is scheduled to be launched at the end of 2002. Then KMA plans to integrate all nowcasting tools into FAS in the next 3 years. We are expecting FAS to be the KMA forecasters' primary tool and to contribute to improving forecasts in KMA.