Systems Development
Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS)
NOAA's mission increasingly demands advanced data management processes, including data integration, to achieve interoperable, accessible, and readily usable observational data. The MADIS system provides a more usable, complete, accurate, timely, and higher density observational network for use in local weather warnings and products, numerical weather prediction, and use by the greater meteorological community. MADIS does this by leveraging partnerships with international agencies; federal, state, and local agencies (e.g. state Departments of Transportation); universities; volunteer networks; and the private sector (e.g. airlines, railroads) to integrate observations from their stations with those of NOAA to provide a finer density and higher frequency observational database for use by the greater meteorological community. MADIS provides value added enhancements to these observations such as Access to real-time and archived data sets; Uniform data formats, observation units, and time stamps; Observational Quality Control (QC); Network-enabled distribution with server- site sub-setting; Authentication for proprietary data; User documentation and help desk support. The MADIS system is currently being transitioned to operations at NWS.
Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS)
The Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS) is a prototype implementation of the latest developments in plume modeling, high resolution weather models, and network enabled operations. These technologies will build upon the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) operational meteorological data delivery system to enable emergency managers from their desktops to quickly determine the impact of toxic spills/releases and hazardous weather events to provide mitigation and response plans to the public and other local and state EOCs using Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) messages distributed through the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).
Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS)
The Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) provides the most complete source of aviation-related weather information on the Internet. In addition to providing conventional products and observations, ADDS provides state-of-the-art graphical forecasts for icing, turbulence, and convection, along with advanced interactive methods for viewing those forecasts. ADDS is being developed jointly by ESRL/GSD, the Research Applications Program of NCAR, and the NWS Aviation Weather Center; funding is provided by the FAA Aviation Weather Research Program.
Volcanic Ash Coordination Tool (VACT)
Collaborative decision-making tool for forecasting dispersion of volcanic ash.
The goal of this project is to develop a workstation that will support modernized National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office (WFO) operations.
Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS)
This is the system designed for interactive graphical forecast preparation in AWIPS, the modernized weather forecast office display system.
FX-Net is a network-based meteorological workstation that provides access to the basic display capability of an AWIPS workstation via the Internet. FX-Net is intended to be an inexpensive PC workstation system for use in a variety of forecast, training, education, and research applications where the full capabilities of a WFO-Advanced type system are not required.
Advanced Linux Prototype System (ALPS)
The original objective of ALPS was to help the National Weather Service accelerate the transition to an all-Linux AWIPS system architecture and to address some associated near-term AWIPS system challenges. Once these initial goals were met, ALPS has served as a platform to explore extensions to the current architecture, including such capabilities as a discovery-based plugin mechanism, interactive drawing tools, simplified addition of new datasets,and integration of non-weather ("One NOAA") global datasets.
FX-Collaborate is an exploratory development to prototype and evaluate advanced workstation concepts. The FXC workstation features some of the basic capabilities of an AWIPS workstation and provides enhanced capabilities such as real-time collaboration, a comprehensive drawing tool, Web access, (limited) telephony, an integrated slide presentation, and Internet access to multiple data servers.
The development of tactical and strategic weather displays of convection, icing, turbulence, and visibility for Traffic Managers.
Range Standardization and Automation (RSA)
Since 2001, GSD has been supporting the Air Force Range Standardization and Automation (RSA) program. Based on the National Weather Service's Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), a system has been tailored by GSD to support space launch operations at the Western (Vandenberg) and Eastern (Cape Canaveral) Ranges. A major goal of this work is to replace legacy systems with an integrated weather display, thus improving the Launch Weather Officers' effectiveness and efficiency.
This system is designed for operational forecasters to view model output and real-time meteorological data in a three-dimensional interactive display.