According to Scott Jacobs, acting chief of the NCEP Systems Integration Branch, NCEP Central Operations (NCO) continued its work on the National Centers Perspective (NCP) client software in September in preparation for forecaster testing, currently scheduled for November. "The development of the required functionality is coming together and we will be conducting full system tests in October to suss out any final issues or bugs that would affect the user experience during their testing," said Jacobs.

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."

NCEP Central Operations (NCO) continued to migrate NAWIPS functionality into the AWIPS II system during the month of July, according to NCO Chief of Systems Integration Michelle Mainelli. "NCO also spent time testing the automated data flow from the Central Computing System to the AWIPS II Test Bed located in the World Weather Building," says Mainelli. Test data includes NCO-provided model data and observational data types including radar mosaics and NCEP-specific satellite imagery.

Participants in the 2011 Unidata GEMPAK Training Workshop were the first class given the opportunity to test-drive CAVE (theCommon AWIPS Visualization Environment). The UPC was testing a single-server standalone EDEX installation providing data for twenty CAVE workstations simultaneously.  Although AWIPS2/CAVE is a 32 bit Java application, the UPC continues testing stability and usability on 64 bit systems.   This single-server/multiple-client AWIPS2 configuration shows promise for University computer lab settings.

According to NCEP Central Operations (NCO) Chief of Systems Integration Michelle Mainelli, in the month of June, NCEP Central Operations, NWS/Office of Science and Technology, and Raytheon Technical Services successfully established a data flow connection between NCEP's Central Computing System and NCEP's Primary Data Flow Server in our AWIPS II Testbed (NTBN) located in the Camp Springs, MD World Weather Building.

"The purpose of this direct connection is to ensure the timely arrival of model, satellite, and observational data to our AWIPS II system," says Mainelli. "The GFS, NAM, and RUC operational model data (in GRIB2 format) are now automatically being sent to NTBN. In order to optimize processing and registration to the database, it was necessary re-write the National Center Perspective (NCP) GRIB decoder."

Testing and refining the GRIB decoder to ensure efficient data processing will continue into early July, says Mainelli.