According to Michelle Mainelli, NCEP Central Operations (NCO) Chief of Systems Integration Michelle Mainelli, Raytheon Technical Services has integrated the NCEP National Center Perspective into the AWIPS II Baseline release. Version OB11.5 of the software was officially released in May 2011.
"The OB11.5 version has been delivered and installed on NCEP's AWIPS II Test Bed for testing, and we expect to receive another update, OB11.6, by mid-June," says Mainelli. "NCO has dedicated significant time in testing and evaluating an automated flow of non-Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN) data into AWIPS II. Unfortunately, the current solution does not meet the timeliness requirements for gridded model data. NCO and the NWS/Office of Science and Technology have agreed to pursue a more direct connect approach to accessing data on the AWIPS II systems. We hope the new approach will help alleviate the data delivery timeliness issues we are currently experiencing."
In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM. The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.
