The Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) is a National Weather Service modernization program, contracted to PRC Inc. In true partnership spirit, the Government and PRC have completed a development process that has lead to an accelerated deployment of AWIPS throughout the contiguous 48 states, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam. A vital part of this deployment is the Local Data Acquisition and Dissemination (LDAD) which provides the mechanism for the exchange of critical weather information between the WFOs and the local community. LDAD will automate the NWS field office interactions with local data observation systems, spotter networks, cooperative observers, and local government agencies. LDAD will be initially integrated with AWIPS, by PRC, as part of AWIPS software Release 4.1 and will be fully integrated as part of Release 4.2. Release 4.2 will provide an interface to the Internet, for which a firewall has been added to the architecture to isolate AWIPS from access by the general public.
The deployment of LDAD is complicated by the fact that some AWIPS sites will require a retrofit of the LDAD components, while other sites will initially receive the hardware but without the operational LDAD software. Some sites will receive both the hardware and operational software upon the initial site installation. The external interfaces requirements to LDAD will probably vary form site to site and must be coordinated early on with the NWS. Only certain standard interfaces will be accommodated during the initial installation. These standard interfaces will be verified as part of the Site Acceptance Test (SAT) procedures.
The purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss how PRC plans to integrate,
test and deploy the LDAD component of AWIPS. The paper will present
the standard LDAD hardware configuration and discuss what options the
sites will have with regard to external interfaces. The paper will
explain what to expect when the LDAD retrofit team arrives on site,
and introduce some of the security concerns that access to the Internet
will mean to an operational site.