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MEMORANDUM FOR: Distribution E
FROM: John H. Ward
Chief, Production Management Branch
SUBJECT: Changes to the NWS Production Suite
The thirty-day operational readiness test for the new
Central Computer System (CCS) is expected to be restarted on
Monday, 7 April, following testing of fixes to the operating
system that will be install on Thursday, 3 April. It is
anticipated that the CCS will not become operational prior to 8
May. An exact date will be determined as soon as possible.
In order to reduce the impact of this delay on planned
implementations, the moratorium on changes to the Production
Suite is being lifted and Production Management Branch will now
accept requests for changes. Routine implementations will
commence by late April. For changes that do not require
additional system resource, implementations will be performed on
both the IBM SP and the CCS. Changes that require additional
system resources, such as the GFDL upgrade and the initiation
of a Fire Weather run, will be implemented on the CCS only.
Products related to the CCS implementations will not be available
until the CCS becomes operational.
By implementing changes on the CCS that are not on the IBM
SP, the switch over to the CCS will not be as transparent as
previously advertised. A WEB site will be established within a
week containing a detailed list of the implementations scheduled
through June. The WEB site will indicate whether the changes
will be made on the CCS only or on both systems. Once the
operational date is established, this WEB site can be used to
determine what changes in product volume, content, or format that
will occur when the CCS becomes operational.
The Production Status WEB page for the parallel runs on the
CCS is available at:
http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/nwpara/prodstat/index.html
The 30-day average times contained on this WEB page should
closely mirror the schedule on the IBM SP prior to the T254
Global Forecast System (GFS) implementation. The parallel status
page now contains the target completion times for specific
forecast products from each model run. As model upgrades are
implemented, every effort will be made to deliver products no
later than the target times indicated. No changes will be made
to these target times without discussions with the customers of
NCEP products. In a number of cases the target times do not
currently match the 30 day average completion time. The target
times are based on plans to adjust the production suite to
conform to a completely symmetric six hour forecast cycle, after
the transition to the CCS is completed.
An on-line user guide for code conversion to the CCS is
available on the NCEP internal WEB server at:
http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/nwprod/ccs_guide/
The guide will be continually updated as new features or
problems with the code conversion are uncovered.
The AVN and MRF descriptors on the NCEP Model Analysis &
Forecast WEB page will be replaced with the GFS on Tuesday, 15
April. Directories and files with this new naming convention are
now available on this web site. Users who access these data
outside of the web page interface may now modify their processing
to pull files with the GFS name instead of AVN or MRF. After 15
April, the AVN and MRF files will no longer exist on this web
site. During the next year all references to the AVN and MRF
descriptors will be replaced by GFS on NWS WEB sites and ftp
servers. A schedule for this action will be provided when it
becomes available.
A preliminary list of implementations for 2003 can be found
at:
http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/changes
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