Status Report: AWIPS and GEMPAK

April 2019 - October 2019

As you are aware, UPC developer Michael James passed away suddenly in late June 2019. The UPC had already hired Shay Carter as a second AWIPS developer, with the expectation that Michael would serve as her mentor as she gained experience with the package. Shay joined the UPC at the beginning of September, and is in the process of coming up to speed with the AWIPS code base.

In an effort to continue to provide the university AWIPS community with seamless support, we have sought the cooperation of several experienced AWIPS developers from NOAA ESRL, NCEP, and elsewhere. It is our hope that we can call on these developers to get more immediate feedback and answers for users who are experiencing difficulties, while Shay learns the ins and outs of AWIPS.  The group is also 0 intended to be a bit of a backup mechanism for her if she runs into problems or questions while she is teaching herself about AWIPS and beginning to develop the software.

Activities Since the Last Status Report

AWIPS

Unidata’s Jetstream EDEX server continues to serve real-time AWIPS data to CAVE clients and through the python-awips data access framework (API). By offloading the processing of one very large data feed (NEXRAD3) to a separate EDEX Ingest Node, the current implementation of edex-cloud is now capable of processing and serving more data than ever before. The distributed architectural concepts of AWIPS allow us to scale EDEX in the cloud to account for the size of incoming data feeds.

Software Releases

18.1.1-6 March 2019

AWIPS 18.1.1-6 is a minor update.

• Updates to Surface, NCEP/Hydro, Upper Air menus and bundles, including return of SIGMET/AIRMET menu.
• Fix for the reprojection of MetarSurfaceTemp data.
• Fix coloring of MetarSurfaceTemp data to avoid rendering of point data as black-on-black.
• Added RTOFS to LDM/EDEX, as well as CAVE menus and data bundles.
• Linux-specific fix for CAVE to allow for RPM updates.
• Linux-specific EDEX dependency updates to include net-tools.
• LDM updated to version 6.13.10.

GEMPAK/NAWIPS

GEMPAK 7.5.1, released in February 2019, is the most recent Unidata release.

https://github.com/Unidata/gempak/releases/tag/7.5.1

Activities Ongoing/In-Progress

AWIPS and GEMPAK development activities are currently in a state of flux. Unidata Program Center staff are currently:

• Helping Shay familiarize herself with the AWIPS code base.
• Seeking to hire an AWIPS technical lead.
• Striving to answer AWIPS support questions from the community.

Future Activities

Future plans are currently in a state of flux. We expect the situation to begin to resolve as Shay comes up to speed and we hire a second developer to enhance the AWIPS team.

Metrics

Downloads March - September 2019

AWIPS downloads: 2975

GEMPAK downloads: 599

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
   Both AWIPS and GEMPAK are freely available, and both incorporate LDM/IDD technology for accessing geoscience data.
   
3. Supporting People
   At this juncture, we are providing a limited amount of technical support for the community, and encouraging community members to assist each other through Unidata-managed forums.

Prepared  September 2019