According to Michelle Mainelli, Chief of the Systems Integration Branch of the National Weather Service's NCEP Central Operation, the AWIPS II development group remains on schedule in the migration of the NAWIPS software to the AWIPS II architecture.

"The NCEP AWIPS II Test Bed has been successfully installed within our facility by Raytheon Technical Services," says Mainelli. "We are in the process of installing and configuring the software component including setting up the data flow to the system."

According to Michelle Mainelli, Chief of the Systems Integration Branch of the National Weather Service's NCEP Central Operation, the N-AWIPS migration to AWIPS II continues on schedule. 'Recent progress includes moving to the most recent Raytheon software baseline. Most migration activity development is wrapping up, with team members addressing bugs reported by customer testing.'

'The long-awaited NCEP AWIPS Test Bed (a full AWIPS system dedicated to current and future NCEP development activities) is scheduled to arrive in late November,' Mainelli continues. 'Integration testing will follow, along with testing other important areas such as dataflow and overall performance. The overall plan is to integrate the N-AWIPS migrated code with the AWIPS II baseline by late February with AWIPS II National Deployment for the NWS beginning late Summer 2011.'

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) has announced a change in the scheduled roll-out of the next generation of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) software package. Operational testing of the AWIPS II package is now planned to extend from January through summer of 2011, and deployment of AWIPS II to the National Weather Service's National Centers is now planned for the fourth quarter of 2011. NCEP expects to make AWIPS II available to the Unidata community during Winter of 2011/2012.

The change in schedule will allow Raytheon Technical Services (the contractor migrating the core AWIPS functionality to the AWIPS II architecture) to address any outstanding issues. The change also gives the AWIPS II development team at NCEP the opportunity to ensure that all existing National Centers AWIPS (NAWIPS) functionality including NMAP2, NWX, NTRANS and NSHARP is included in the AWIPS II application before the initial deployment.

Progress continues as Unidata collaborates with NWS and NCEP on the N-AWIPS migration to AWIPS II. An updated (today) draft white paper, originally presented to the joint Unidata Policy Committee and Users Committee last month, provides in depth information, along with the latest schedules for the project.

Be sure to watch for continued updates in the Unidata News section on Unidata's home page and occasional e-letter articles pertaining to the effort.

• Update on NAWIPS/GEMPAK Migration to AWIPS-II - March 2010 - Michelle Mainelli, NCEP Central Operations

The UPC is keenly aware that the upcoming migration of GEMPAK/NAWIPS to AWIPS-II will have a significant impact on our community and that many of you have concerns. Be assured that we are fully committed to supporting university GEMPAK users for as long as feasible, even as we work with our users in providing a smooth and orderly migration to other long term solutions.