In the forthcoming 18.1.1 AWIPS release:

• Inclusion of new AWIPS Hazards plugins for decision assistance (new product generation tools and hydro configurations to integrate with WarnGen and the Hydro perspective).
• New Space Weather Prediction Center plugins for Geomagnetic Data, Solar Imagery, Generic High Cadence Data, and Time Series displays).
• Unidata now has the source code to build 64-bit Hydro Applications (these Hydroapps were supplied as 32-bit binaries in the Vlab source code repositories, which were disabled in previous Unidata AWIPS releases).
• OGC and Data Delivery plugins will be made available in the 18.1.1 release as an optional add-on to a standard EDEX Data Server installation (two additional RPMs).
• OHD and Hydro Applications will also be made available as optional EDEX add-ons in the awips2-edex-dat and awips2-hydroapps RPMs.
• New roles/permissions framework.
• Database reconfiguration (moved from /awips2/data to /awips2/database/data, now with 'awipsadmin' ownership).
• Fix CAVE crash when starting GFE for non-activated site.
• Updates to allow dynamic contributions to the Volume Browser.
• Updates to the Qpid Broker and Localization REST configuration including Protected File status.
• New viz method IGLMesh for easier extensibility.
• Ability to handle derived parameter cubes at a single point.
• Search By Name has been added to the Localization Perspective.
• ADE updates for Eclipse 4.6.1.
• Geotools updated to 16.4.
• Cython updated to 0.28.3.
• httpd-pypies updated to 2.4.27.
• python-dateutil updated to 2.7.3.
• qpid-lib updated to 1.38.0.
• werkzeug updated to 0.14.1.
• yajsw updated to 12.09.

Shown here are plots for Base Reflectivity (N0Q, 94) and Base Velocity (N0U, 99) using AWIPS data rendered with Matplotlib, Cartopy, and MetPy. This example improves upon existing Level 3 Python rendering by doing the following:

• Display scaled and labeled colorbar below each figure.
• Plot radar radial images as coordinate maps in Cartopy and label with lat/lon.
• 8 bit Z and V colormap and data scaling added to MetPy from operational AWIPS.
• Level 3 data are retrieved from the Unidata EDEX Cloud server (edex-cloud.unidata.ucar.edu)
• Raw HDF5 byte data are converted to product values.

A little known fact in the world of AWIPS(II) is just how dependent the system still is on NAWIPS-GEMPAK. The entire National Centers Perspective is dependent on pre-built shared object files for 64-bit Linux, which means that all of the D2D plugins which extend NSHARP (for bufr obs, NPP profiles, forecast models, etc.) also depend on these libraries.

This dependency has prevented use of the NSHARP plugin in the first release (15.1.1) of the OS X CAVE client. These are the steps taken to build NSHARP and GEMPAK libraries for OS X AWIPS 16.2.2.

One of the new data visualizations available in the upcoming AWIPS 16.2.2 release is a recreation of the legacy GEMPAK/NAWIPS colored temperature ("color_temp") bundle.

The Python AWIPS Data Access Framework can be used to query available grid parameters and levels if given a known Grid name (as of AWIPS 15.1.3 we can not query derived parameters, only parameters which have been directly decoded).