September 2011 Status Update: NAWIPS Migration to AWIPS II

According to Scott Jacobs, acting chief of the NCEP Systems Integration Branch, NCEP Central Operations (NCO) continued its integration of NAWIPS functionality into AWIPS II during August. "The main forucs is now to make the system stable and ready for forecaster testing in November," says Jacobs. "This includes collecting, decoding and storing more data types. We have emphasized getting more numerical model grid data ingested into the database."

Improvements to coordination between NCO and Raytheon (the primary AWIPS II software developer) have also been implemented, Jacobs continues. "We established a process to get automatic software updates from Raytheon via the NWS Office of Science and Technology. This allowed us to update quickly to version 11.7, the latest version at the time. Prior to this update method, it would take us over a month to integrate all changes from Raytheon with the SIB enhancements. Now, we can do continuous integration which allows us to submit our code to Raytheon in a more timely manner."