NWS meteorologists demonstrating AWIPS II

Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Atmospheric Science Program has been able to acquire a dedicated AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server and three Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE) workstations. The machines were deployed in our Atmospheric Science computer lab in mid-August 2015, just prior to the start of the 2015-16 academic year. Over the past year, our program has seen maximum benefit from these resources in two areas: strengthening our partnership with the Milwaukee/Sullivan, Wisconsin National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office (MKX) and as a tool to enhance student development outside of a formal classroom setting.

Unidata is pleased to announce the availability of the Python Data Access Framework (DAF). The DAF provides access to an AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server directly from Python code. Created by Unidata Program Center software engineer Michael James, the DAF strengthens Unidata's AWIPS II offerings by making it easier to retrieve data from the AWIPS II data storage system from outside the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE).

Users have always been able to request real time NCEP/NWS weather data using AWIPS II, but now, with the addition of the Python DAF, users can request this data using only simple python commands.

Unidata EDEX and CAVE version 15.1.2 are now available.

Our cloud-based data server (edex-cloud.unidata.ucar.edu) has been updated to the latest build and is serving a larger set of data than before, including a subset of MRMS grids.

Read the full article for instructions on updating your existing AWIPS II installation.

Editor's Note: Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU) is one of a handful of universities of varying sizes that have incorporated AWIPS II into labs and classrooms in the past two years. MSU's experience shows that incorporating the new NWS technology into the educational mix is both possible and useful even for a small undergraduate program. This article outlines the MSU AWIPS II configuration and discusses some of the adjustments the program made to get the system running smoothly.

Thanks to a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant coupled with some local resources from our university, we (Professor Sam Ng and co-PI Chris Kimmett) at Metropolitan State University in Denver have been able to successfully bring the National Weather Service's AWIPS II forecasting system into the classroom. Professor Ng used AWIPS II alongside Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer as core tools in the Spring 2015 “Weather Analysis Techniques” course for undergraduate meteorology majors, and will continue using AWIPS II in the Fall semester and into the future.

If you are upgrading from 14.2.1 to 14.4.1, it is required that you completely uninstall your 14.2.1 instance before installing 14.4.1, to ensure that all required packages are installed (there were some updates to package names and release numbers that may cause conflict on yum groupupdate).