AWIPS II

Status Report: October 2013 to May 2014

Michael James

AWIPS II Beta Release Progress

The development baseline AWIPS II source code is maintained in a git repository on National Weather Service servers. Unidata has been allowed access to this repository thanks to our partnership with NCEP. The NCEP 14.2.1 source code branch is the baseline for the upcoming Unidata AWIPS II beta release.

Release Schedule

Going forward, the supported operating system for AWIPS II is 64-bit Linux (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora Core). Full system requirements for server, client and development deployments are available on the Unidata AWIPS II software page.

Given current project progress, the next expected release date for Unidata AWIPS II is July 2014.

Release Checklist

  1. connect to AWIPS II development baseline git repository and gerrit (done)
  2. branch remotes/origin/ncep_14.2.1 to upc for next beta release (done)
  3. CAVE UI updates, map and menu reconfiguration. (in progress)
  4. database updates for new grid, radar, scatterometer products (in progress)
  5. mute alertviz and prevent from adding to startup scripts on install
  6. GEMPAK 7 should be able to read from remote HDF5/PyPIES, Postgres
  7. build RPMs for all components.
  8. test test test RPMs for install and runtime errors on various Linux systems.
  9. release Unidata AWIPS II 14.2.1 beta to the EDU community and gather their thoughts once again.

Recent Work

The National Centers Perspective (NCP) will be the primary GUI offered and supported by Unidata, with the user having the ability to switch into different perspectives (D2D, Hydro, GFE, etc.), but the extent of UPC support for function of these other perspectives is still uncertain.

Difference between Unidata CAVE NCP and NCEP CAVE NCP

NCEP CAVE NCP is designed to run continuously on a forecaster's workstation, and as delivered in the NCEP 14.2.1 branch, takes a significantly long time to load, freezing the splash dialog as it loads, finally alerting the user with a large red error message immediately on startup. This is operational software with heavy startup cost and we need to deliver it to a student / research environment where click-to-load does not take 30 seconds (10 seconds loading is an extremely long time for a piece of desktop software).

The Unidata AWIPS II release has some modification to work around these slow startup times, as well as updates to the user interface:

  1. A number of NCEP-requires geographic areas, which require slow pre-rendering, have been removed from startup, shortening the load time of CAVE by half. The geographic projections offered in the default suite of Area in the CAVE GUI offer enough.
  2. The D2D progressive-disclosure default base maps, which shows county outlines when zoomed in far enough, but not zoomed out.
  3. The Data Resource Legend was moved from bottom-right to top-left to better work as a kind of "loaded inventory" for map-maker end users.
  4. The names given to data and groups of data in the AWIPS II framework (RBD, SPF, SPF Group, Display, View, Editor, Map) have been simplified to more understandable terms such as Data, Bundle, Map.
  5. Use of the Font Awesome bootstrap icon set, an update over the dated two-tone NMAP2 icons.

EDEX Data Server Engineering

The standalone EDEX server at Unidata data throughput is approximately 120 GB/day, including the global 0.5 degree resolution GFS and GEFS (via CONDUIT) and the full nationwide suite of level 3 NEXRAD products. The default NWS configuration for EDEX can not support such data throughput. I found a way involving solid state hard drives and tweaks made to the EDEX data decoder threads.

Data Products Added

1 km national NEXRAD composite for DHR, DVL, HHC and EET are supported in Unidata AWIPS II as McIDAS Area files. Fixed-domain WRF-NMM output in grib2 has also been added, and support for floating-domain WRF grids is being investigated.