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The Valparaiso University Meteorology program strives to keep current with meteorological technologies so our students can maximize their educational opportunities. For the past seven years, the National Weather Service has been designing and building a new version of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System — used in weather forcast offices and national centers — called AWIPS II. This new software program will be made available to universities as a result of cooperation between Unidata, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and Raytheon, the company developing the application. Recently, Unidata has been working on developing a methodology for deploying this versatile tool to campuses across the country, and has encouraged universities to apply for grants to aid in the development process. Valparaiso University's Meteorology program was awarded a 2012 Community Equipment Award grant to allow it to serve as a test school for the deployment of AWIPS II. Because our program has limited resources and infrastructure support, we provide an ideal “small school” test case for the deployment of AWIPS II. Specifically, the Unidata Equipment grant allowed our program to purchase the main server that will ingest data for AWIPS II. The server is a HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 Server, with plenty of storage for all of the data.
The meteorology program at Valparaiso University is a long-time user of many software packages developed and maintained by Unidata. Our twenty-station weather center, which is regularly used for coursework and research, was recently updated to a dual-monitor Linux lab that supports many different software programs, including existing packages from Unidata and (eventually) AWIPS II. By allowing students to view meteorological data through a program widely used by government meteorologists across the country, the new server purchased with Unidata Equipment award funds will help the program to better prepare students for work in any meteorological job, especially those seeking National Weather Service employment.
Currently, we use a combination of Unidata software programs (including GEMPAK and the IDV) and Internet sources, some of which also also make use of Unidata software packages. Once full implementation is achieved, the Valparaiso University Weather Center will be upgraded to include the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE), which will be heavily utilized in junior and senior coursework as students gain experience interpreting weather maps and making forecasts for the local region. AWIPS II and the CAVE viewer will present a one-stop shop for all weather-related data available through Unidata's Internet Data Distribution system (IDD), which can then be supplemented by other outside sources.
Additionally, we have been able to test the AWIPS II installation procedures and provide feedback to Unidata. As of this writing, we have not yet been able to successfully install and use the development versions of the software package, but we are learning a lot about the system through the testing phase. As a result of our participation in the testing process, we hope to be able to share our expertise to other universities as they do their own installations of the final AWIPS II package.
For additional information on the Unidata Community Equipment Awards, visit the Equipment Awards page.
