AWIPS II

Status Report: September 2012

Michael James

Strategic Focus Areas

AWIPS II activities support Unidata's strategic goals in the following ways:

  1. Enable widespread, efficient access to geoscience data
    Interest in AWIPS II by the University community is high and growing as the date for NWS national deployment approaches. Unidata is committed to assisting Universities in the migration from NAWIPS to AWIPS II, and ensuring that the Unidata AWIPS II release is stable, efficient and capable of meeting the needs of users.
  2. Develop and provide open-source tools for effective use of geoscience data
    As AWIPS II is developed by the National Weather Service, when released through Unidata, the software will be entirely open source and freely available. The service-oriented architecture of AWIPS II contains a number of independently-operating services, each with a clearly defined role, and contains a number of established, open-source software components.
  3. Provide cyberinfrastructure leadership in data discovery, access, and use
    Users of AWIPS II will have access to the same data currently available to other Unidata visualization packages through use of the LDM, requested from the IDD network.
  4. Build, support, and advocate for the diverse geoscience community
    It's becoming a strong possibility that Unidata will act as a development-group organizer for the university community, fostering collaborative development to expand the use of the AWIPS II package in atmospheric science research and education environments.

Activities Since the Last Status Report

Regular Software and ADE/Source Code Releases

    Unidata continues to receive regular releases of AWIPS II, including source code and the Eclipse development environment, from the National Weather Service (12.4, 12.8) and National Center for Environmental Prediction (12.4, 12.5, 12.8, 12.10 upcoming).

AWIPS II Demonstration at the Unidata Triennial Workshop

    Michelle Mainelli and David Plummer (NCEP) provided a remote demonstration of new AWIPS II National Centers Perspective functionality at the Unidata Triennial Workshop in July. A short overview of AWIPS II data flow was also presented, detailing the recommended hardware and software configuration for non-operational by the University community.

NCEP and Raytheon Conference Calls

    Unidata continues to participate in weekly teleconferences with NCEP and the National Centers. Unidata is also now participating in a bi-weekly developers conference call with Raytheon and their development organizations.

AWIPS II Data Flow

    The UPC is attempting to demonstrate that AWIPS II is capable of running entirely on a single server for non-operational use, as opposed to a multiple servers and clusters such as at National Centers and NWS forecast offices. Of primary importance is determining if data request, decoding and ingest can handle the throughput expected of a NAWIPS/GEMPAK replacement (a number of different data types of nationwide and global surface, upper-air, satellite, radar data and gridded numerical model products). The UPC has made great strides in reducing the resource footprint of the AWIPS II system by eliminating a number of operation-specific components and adjusting the configuration of the AWIPS II LDM.

    before | after

Beta Test Program

    The UPC is conducting a small beta testing program involving four Universities identified as core members of the Unidata community. The current phase of testing is to determine the feasibility of installing the AWIPS II EDEX server components on a single machine, as well as help the UPC determine the most common problems encountered during installation and maintenance of the system, to better offer support to the community when the software is released.

Planned Activities

Ongoing Activities

  • Unidata has provided the NCEP-release 12.5.1 to the beta testing program, with plans to supply testers with 12.8.1 in the near future.

New Activities

  • Testing CAVE functionality in a virtual machine
  • AMS 2012 abstract submitted on the AWIPS II EDEX server testing being done at the UPC.