The NEXRAD (Next Generation Weather Radar) agencies are in the process of rehosting the computer subsystems of the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) to Open Systems compliant platforms. An understanding of the computer industry's current capabilities in this area, and apparent trends, is important not only to the selection of the computer platform for the initial deployment, but also to planning for the long term process of maintaining technological currency for the WSR-88D. This paper presents a process for evaluating current candidate platforms, an evaluation of industry trends and the results of this particular study.
The candidate evaluation process presented, with considerations and requirements formally described, allows for the identification of several distributed processing environment, standards based, open systems compliant platforms which could satisfy the WSR-88D system requirements. Current and predicted trends concerning workstation versus PC-based platforms are also presented. Finally, the paper presents recommendations for several open systems compliant platforms that meet the WSR-88D requirements for processing capability, expandability, reliability, maintainability and cost effectiveness.