GEMPAK Status Report

Michael James
March 23, 2009

Highlights

GEMPAK 5.11.4 (to be released second week of April 2009) feature summary
GEMPAK 5.11.4 beta released February 4, 2009 feature summary
NAWIPS to AWIPS2 migration
March 12-13 In-House Workshop

Current Status

GEMPAK 5.11.4 release (April 2009)

There have been various calling sequence changes since the release of GEMPAK 5.11.1. Updates include:

TWDR and level II radar can now be displayed in its native 250m resolution. Previous versions has a resolution of 1000m hard-coded.
GUI selection of ensembles in NMAP - A new table model_group.tbl contains information necessary for setting model selection and ensemble product restore files.
The TAF decoder has been modified to decode the forecast hour up to 30 instead of 24 and can accept original FM51 TAF Aerodrome forecast data and new FM51 extended TAF Aerodrome forecast data.
Three new grid diagnostic functions: 1) inverse normal cumulative distribution function (INCD), 2) cumulative binormal finite mixture distribution function (BNCDF), and 3) inverse cumulative binormal finite mixture distribution function (IBNCD).

More information can be found in the release notes NMAP2 Help "What's New" section:

GEMPAK 5.11.4 beta release

It was decided to give GEMPAK users a chance to report back to Unidata on any issues they encountered due to these changes, which is why the initial GEMPAK 5.11.4 release in February 2009 was labeled "beta".

NAWIPS to AWIPS II transition

The UPC is keenly aware that the upcoming migration of GEMPAK/NAWIPS to AWIPS-II will have a significant impact on our community and that many of you have concerns. Be assured that we are fully committed to supporting university GEMPAK users for as long as feasible, even as we work with our users in providing a smooth and orderly migration to other long term solutions. We have set up a web page with information about the transition, including an FAQ.

We are currently evaluating the latest release (TO10) of AWIPS II which was released in February 2009, and are working with the User's Committee to identifiy and prioritize GEMPAK functionality that must be replaced in new software incarnations. We are expecting a preliminary alpha release of NAWIPS in the AWIPS II environment sometime in April for evaluation.

For more information, please see:

GEMPAK/NAWIPS Migration Information

March 12-13 In-House Workshop

Alan Czarnetzki and two of this students/computer support persons from the University of Northern Iowa visited Unidata on March 12-13 for a short workshop on LDM and GEMPAK. We'll be assisting them as they work to setup the LDM + GEMPAK together on their new system and expand their weather product generation.