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).

If you direct your AWIPS II repo (/etc/yum.repos.d/awips2.repo) to point to https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/repos/yum/awips2-dev/ (rather than https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/repos/yum/awips2/) you can install the latest development build of AWIPS II (currently 14.4.1-5n13), which has limited support for MRMS (Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor) products available as grids.

A quick look at some of the new models supported in Unidata AWIPS II 14.4.1, to be released Summer 2015.