Contact: Barry Reichenbaugh FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(301) 713-0622 2/14/95
General Sciences Corporation (GSC) of Laurel, Md., today was awarded a five-year, $5.8 million contract to provide automated data processing support services for the development of software for the modernization of the National Weather Service (NWS), the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced.
The resources provided by this contract will help the weather service improve its capability to generate and distribute forecast products nationally.
In the initial year, GSC will provide programming support and development, along with graphics development. Costs for the first phase are estimated at $1 million. Options for additional services are valued at about $4.8 million. A subcontractor, Ellsworth Associates, Inc., an 8(a) company based in Vienna, Va., will perform approximately 30 percent of the effort.
Under the contract, GSC will participate in the design, development, integration and deployment of software to be run at the weather service's national centers on the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS). AWIPS, being developed by another NWS contractor, will connect the national centers and forecast offices with each other and will provide them with data gathered by radars, satellites and other advanced observing technologies. The software to be developed by GSC, called N-AWIPS, will be used by the National Weather Service's National Meteorological Center (NMC) in Camp Springs, Md.
With AWIPS, local forecasters will be able to get their forecast guidance products in near real time, making it possible to update forecast information more frequently and to expand the variety of products the forecast offices offer. N-AWIPS will provide the enhanced capabilities that are required to support operations of the NMC and other centers around the country. An important step under the contract will be to replace manual techniques for producing graphical products with electronic graphs and charts generated at modern workstations.
The NMC, with specialized centers around the country, has a primary role in analyzing data collected from various sources such as satellites, field offices, and worldwide meteorological organizations and using that information to generate numerical models. These model outputs are then distributed to the appropriate local forecast offices and independent clients and used in producing weather forecasts.
"The N-AWIPS system is absolutely essential to the National Meteorological Center," said Ronald McPherson, director of the NMC. "N-AWIPS will allow the NMC to provide coordinated forecast guidance to weather forecast offices, and to direct forecast products to such users as the aviation and marine communities."
GSC will focus its initial efforts on developing and deploying advanced software to the NMC's National Hurricane Center in Miami and the National Severe Storms Forecast Center.
Founded in 1977 as a small minority business, GSC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).