AWIPS is the integrating element of the $4.5 billion NWS Modernization program. AWIPS has been under development since the 1980s. During this same period, the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) developed WFO-Advanced. WFO-Advanced was incorporated into AWIPS with Build 3.0.
AWIPS through WFO-Advanced has a sophisticated, state of the operational art forecaster toolkit. The WFO-Advanced user interface is easy to learn to use, and allows the forecaster to rapidly access a wide variety of weather data, and analyze and display those data in many ways. As WFO-Advanced was based on NWS requirements, it includes five scales, the largest being the Northern Hemisphere and North America.
NOAA plans to invest $550 million in AWIPS. It is in the best interest of everyone to leverage the NWS investment to the greatest extent practical. AWIPS could become the standard for the Federal Government, and adapted for use by commercial and international customers. Potential AWIPS users quickly note the strengths and usefulness of AWIPS. However, there are a few important shortfalls that affect many potential users. These shortfalls are the need for global coverage (the need to be able to establish a window of variable size over any area of the globe) and the associated global data sources.
The AWIPS shortfalls above have been addressed. As an example, the
Aviation Weather Center hosted a demonstration in May 1998 in which
AWIPS had been modified to display global model grids as well as ingest
and display satellite data from Meteosat and other global data sources.
The efforts are being extended to address other areas that will make
AWIPS the solution of choice for international users requiring a sophisticated
meteorological workstation and data processing system. This paper will
describe the version of AWIPS being tailored to potential international
use and provide an update on the status of this initiative