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AWIPS
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Status Report: AWIPS

November 2023- April 2024

Tiffany Meyer, Shay Carter

Executive Summary

Since the last status report, the team has successfully completed beta development of AWIPS version 20.3.2 and released a production build in December, 2023.   Up until now, the team has also supported a v18 EDEX in case of emergencies for academic institutes that were dependent on the previous version.   Immediately following the production release the team began development on version 23.4.1 of AWIPS which will migrate us from RHEL7 (and CentOS7) dependencies to RHEL 8.  This is especially pressing because CentOS7 has an EOL for June 30th.  The AWIPS team is aiming to put out a beta release of v23.4.1 by the time you are reading this report.

Aside from software development, the team had a presence at AMS 2024, with Tiffany Meyer hosting an AWIPS Student Workshop and a talk highlighting the updates of NSF Unidata’s developments.  Thank you to our friends at Texas A&M and Dr. Nowotarski for putting us in touch with meteorology student Victoria Elliott who also presented at our AMS student workshop!  

Finally, the AWIPS team has been involved in some work to try and develop funding opportunities from the private and commercial sectors that are interested in using our software and services.  The team hopes to make a bit of progress on this venture to help ease our upcoming budget concerns.

Questions for Immediate Committee Feedback

Please let us know if you use AWIPS in the classroom, if not, what’s the biggest obstacle keeping you from doing so?

Activities Since the Last Status Report

AWIPS

Our EDEX servers have been continuously running on the new Jetstream2 platform since it was released, however there have been numerous issues (from Jetstream or their vendors) that we’ve encountered on the new platform. The AWIPS team has worked closely with Unidata IT, Science Gateway coworkers (Ana and Julien) and the Jetstream staff to troubleshoot and resolve issues that arise.  We have been maintaining a suite of EDEX servers since the beginning of the year: a production v18 server, both a production and development/backup v20 server, and as of recently, a v23 development server.  Our production server continues to serve real-time weather and geographic data to CAVE clients and the python-awips data access framework API. 

Through the use of ancillary EDEX machines we have been able to decouple certain datasets from the main EDEX instance. We take advantage of distributing EDEX workload over three machines: a main EDEX, an ancillary radar EDEX, and an ancillary satellite EDEX. These distributed architectural concepts of AWIPS allow us to scale EDEX in the cloud to account for the size of incoming data feeds.

Since the last status report, we’ve put out two production releases of v20 and are working hard on an upcoming v23 beta release which will include only a CAVE virtual machine and linux distribution . Our latest release is version 20.3.2-2. A link to all of our AWIPS release notes can be found here. We have also put out a production release of v20 python-awips.  The production release of v20 also came with a new offering of Alaska data – we now serve NAM data for the AK region, thanks to a user request that we were able to accommodate.

Throughout the development cycles of the beta and production releases, we have been collecting user feedback through this reporting form. This method has been an invaluable tool to collect, track, and update users on issues found in version 20 of AWIPS.  The team plans to create a similar reporting form to use in development with the new v23 AWIPS as well.

Version 23.4.1 will have some significant upgrades in the software dependencies, the most notable being the Operating System and Python:

The Operating System is significant because currently the NSF Unidata version of CAVE is dependent on RHEL7 (RedHat Enterprise Linux version 7) and we use CentOS7 as a compatible, free option for the operating system.  Unfortunately, CentOS7 is reaching its End of Life (EOL) on June 30th, 2024, so we are pushing to have a production release of AWIPS that depends on a newer operating system.  We have written an AWIPS Tips blog discussing our plans around this issue, but the summary is version 23.4.1 of AWIPS is RHEL8 dependent and we will be using Rocky8 as our free operating system. It is important to note that previous versions of AWIPS are not compatible with the new version 23.

A significant portion of our documentation both for CAVE, EDEX, and python-awips has been modified for easier understanding and comprehension.  For the production release of v20, all of our documentation was reviewed and updated with all new screenshots and instructions. We are continuing to update our python-awips example notebooks to follow our new template that contains a helpful table of contents, with consistent subsections across the various example topics.

Our blog series, AWIPS Tips, has successfully been running every other week for over three years now.  A current list and breakdown of all the entries is provided on our documentation website in the Educational Resources page. We plan to continue the blog series for the foreseeable future and have several more ideas already planned out for upcoming entries. Announcements for new blog posts are shared through our mailing list (awips2-users@unidata.ucar.edu), and our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube when applicable).

We have asynchronous training available for both CAVE and Python-AWIPS on the Educational Resources website.  We encourage everyone to check out both courses regardless of your experience level or familiarity with python or CAVE.  Our courses can be accessed from our elearning website.

NSF Unidata’s AWIPS group has the highest support interactions out of all the individual projects, as seen here in the latest support reply summary.  Through our support signatures we still have an active support evaluation survey. The majority of our feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and the graphic below is a summary from all responses we’ve received regarding the quality of service we provide:

Forms response chart. Question title: Service Quality. Number of responses: .

Some of the latest open-ended feedback from the support evaluations includes the following:

The AWIPS team was able to send Tiffany to AMS 2024 where she hosted and led the Unidata AWIPS Student Workshop, which was a great success and had an estimated 70 attendees.  The workshop consisted of presentations on how AWIPS in the classroom can lead to important experience and qualifications when applying for jobs in the National Weather Service, demonstrations of CAVE and python-awips, and a first-hand telling from Victoria Elliott (a Texas A&M grad student) of how AWIPS is used in the classroom in their Meteorology programs.

In addition to the workshop, Tiffany was at our NSF Unidata booth during the student conference career fair, where we had the opportunity to interact with students of all grades from around the country.  The team gave an AWIPS update presentation during the second AWIPS System Updates session later in the week.

The AWIPS team has had discussions with management as to if we’re allowed to sell data “subscription” services to commercial and private sector entities.  This idea may also include a paid EDEX  installation workshop, as well as some possible EDEX maintenance workshops that the team could put on periodically and sell to our commercial sector users.  The material developed for these workshops would be available to our academic community free of charge.

Lastly, since the last update, the AWIPS and Science Gateway teams have had to deal with significant Jestream2 (JS2) disruptions.  Unfortunately, this presents to our users and EDEX outages and is bringing down our overall up time for our end users. The situation is complicated though, because the partnership with JS2 allows us to support and maintain many more machines than would be fiscally possible with any commercial cloud provider.

Software Releases

Since our last status report we have put out two production  releases for version 20. These updates include the proper inclusion of the gridslice package for both MacOS and Windows CAVE which allows the rendering of isentropic data, various CAVE and EDEX updates, and continued fixes and enhancements for each of the supported operating systems. Additionally, we upgraded our release of python-awips to version 20 for both pip and Conda installation managers.

We successfully moved from supporting version 18 to version 20 before the end of 2023, and assisted our known EDEX maintainers at Texas A&M during the winter school break with their EDEX and CAVE migrations.

The team has since been actively developing a new major release of AWIPS – version 23.4.1.  Significant progress has been made and so far we have been able to incorporate all previous Unidata-added functionality from version 20 into the new version 23.  We are hoping to release a beta of 23.4.1 by early May, and aim to have a production release for all three operating systems (MacOS, Windows, and Linux) before the CentOS7 EOL on June 30th.  So far, we have also been able to create a beta version of python-awips for v23 and it seems to be functioning well in our existing Jupyter notebook examples.

Activities Ongoing/In-Progress

AWIPS development activities are constantly ongoing. Currently the following activities are in progress:

Future Activities

Future plans are constantly evolving to meet the needs of our users. The AWIPS team is focused on developing and releasing a production version of AWIPS on RHEL8 (Rocky 8) before the CentOS7 EOL. When this goes live, we will also update our python-awips package to have the latest v23 installation available on Conda and pip.  We are actively participating in conferences, workshops, and virtual message boards (blogs) to expand our user base.  Finally, the AWIPS team is testing the waters on developing possible business agreements with commercial and private entities to help bring in additional funds.  

Metrics

Downloads November 1, 2023 - March 31, 2024

AWIPS downloads: 3,482

Strategic Focus Areas

We support the following goals described in Unidata Strategic Plan:

  1. Managing Geoscience Data
    The cloud-based EDEX data server continues to see widespread use and growing adoption. More and more datasets continue to be added to the server as Unidata deploys more decode/ingest nodes.
  2. Providing Useful Tools
    All     AWIPS tools (EDEX, CAVE, and python-awips) are freely available, and also incorporate LDM/IDD technology for accessing geoscience data.
  3. Supporting People
    At this juncture, we are providing full technical support with regards to AWIPS for the community.

Prepared April 2024