AWIPS II

Status Report: September 2013

Michael James

Strategic Focus Areas

The AWIPS II group's work supports the following Unidata funding proposal focus areas:

  1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
    Beta testing program began with 5 core sites and has now been opened to any US-based geoscience or meteorology program who wishes to take part in the evaluation and testing of the EDEX data server and CAVE client.
  2. Advancing data services
    Documenting all data decoders and supported data products available via the Unidata IDD.
  3. Developing and deploying useful tools
    Though Unidata is not currently developing AWIPS II visualization plugins, the customization of CAVE perspectives and updating and editing of configuration files specific to data decoders will allow us to keep up with the latest data file types.
  4. Enhancing user support services
    AWIPS II has had a dedicated support ticket address at Unidata for a number of years now, and Jeff Weber will play a role in supporting and training users on the AWIPS II system during the beta and after the first release.
  5. Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
    Because the AWIPS II project is developed solely for operational use by the National Weather Service, Unidata is in a unique role, the first non-operational release to the public will be the Unidata AWIPS II release. Unidata also has the opportunity to be leaders in AWIPS II training, both on the installation of the system and the development of plugins.

Activities Since the Last Status Report

Beta Testing Continued

Now open to any US-based geoscience/meteorology department. Current members and status of testing:

  • Texas A&M (G. Creager) - Has one standalone EDEX server installed and has set up two KVM Virtual Machines running CentOS 5.
  • Iowa State (D. Herzmann) - Have purchased one server for standalone EDEX with plans to purchase two more. 13.2.1 standalone EDEX server performs well, but ISU would like to provide their large archives to the Unidata community via EDEX servers, but it's not clear yet what is the best way to serve archived data through EDEX. Additional concerns about security risk when opening an EDEX server to the outside.
  • Penn State (A. Person) -
  • Valparaiso (K. Goebbert) - Single standalone server successfully running CAVE but reporting some bugs in the UPC configuration and a lot of CAVE errors (which is normal behavior at the moment).
  • Univ. at Albany (K. Tyle) - One standalone server. No remote access tested yet.
  • College of DuPage (V. Gensini) - Currently running 7 GEMPAK machines with approx. 10 students with GEMPAK scripting experience. They have two new servers and have said they will support an EDEX server for remote access.
  • Two individuals have requested UPC AWIPS II for personal use.

Next Unidata Release

  • Further work with rpmbuild for re-packaging.
  • Updating of awips2-edex-upc configuration RPM.
  • ADE 13.2 is running CAVE in debug mode on moe.unidata.ucar.edu
  • Exploring Apache Thrift serialization/deserialization for Python webapp clients and possibility of THREDDS data server back-end.
  • EDEX 13.4.1 evaluated but passed on the next beta release. Too many configuration updates needed, unstable Qpid message broker, new errors to investigate in log files.
  • Thin-client investigation. Currently running CAVE 13.5 Windows thin client, much more stable than 13.2.
  • May be best to wait until 14.1 with RHEL6 support and possibly 64-bit EDEX server. Expected release early 2014.

AMS 2014 Abstract Submission

  • AWIPS II at the Unidata Program Center: Status Update to be presented at the 30th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies to be held at the 94th AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Planned Activities

Ongoing Activities

We plan to continue the following activies:

  • Supporting GEMPAK/NAWIPS until the AWIPS II CAVE client is determined to be a suitable replacement for our community.
  • Accepting new members to our AWIPS II beta-testing group.
  • Authoring detailed and extensive documentation on all things AWIPS II.

New Activities

We plan to organize or take part in the following:

  • Being granted read-only access to the Raytheon source code baseline.
  • Management of Unidata AWIPS II source code on github.
  • Transitioning the GEMPAK/AWIPS II workshop to a richer AWIPS II workshop.
  • Holding the first AWIPS II development workshop at the UPC.
  • Demonstrate serialization/deserialization of data from EDEX data server to webapp client.