This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held January 4-8 in Phoenix, Arizona. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.
With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.
In April, 2013, the first UPC-release of AWIPS II (version 13.2.1) was provided for a limited number of universities. Now, Unidata welcomes additional sites to join this program. Please read further for details on how to participate as a beta tester.
The Valparaiso University Meteorology program strives to keep current with meteorological technologies so students can maximize their educational opportunities. Valparaiso University's Meteorology program was awarded a 2012 Community Equipment Award grant to allow it to serve as a test school for the deployment of AWIPS II. Because our program has limited resources and infrastructure support, we provide an ideal "small school" test case for the deployment of AWIPS II.
Unidata is currently evaluating AWIPS II release 13.1.2, which includes a new unified grib decoder to supply both D2D and the National Centers Perspective with gridded data. With this decoder upgrade and the UPC's improved decoding of high-volume NEXRAD3 and CONDUIT feeds, the last major addition to AWIPS II before release is GEMPAK functionality. GEMPAK 7 will be released as an add-on to AWIPS II for the National Centers and the Unidata community.
If you're interested in the AWIPS II project and attending the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans, make some time in your schedule to stop by Unidata's booth in the exhibit hall. Unidata developer Michael James will be providing demonstrations throughout the day, and we'll also be hosting additional demonstrations by project leaders from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.
Scott Jacobs, acting chief of the NCEP Systems Integration Branch, NCEP Central Operations (NCO), made a remote presentation on the status of AWIPS II development during Unidata's joint Users and Policy committee meeting in October. Jacobs' presentation highlighted several details of the migration status...
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.
