Published using Google Docs
AWIPS
Updated automatically every 5 minutes

Status Report: AWIPS

April 2023- November 2023

Tiffany Meyer, Shay Carter

Executive Summary

Since the last status report, the team has been developing the Beta, version 20.3.2 of AWIPS, while maintaining our production version of 18.2.1. Both versions have had production and development EDEX systems hosted on the Jetstream2 platform since last summer. The team is excited to announce that we are planning on releasing a production version of 20.3.2 before the end of the year, and fully transitioning away from v18 – the first major upgrade of AWIPS for this team.

Throughout the year, for version 20, we have released significantly simplified and improved installers of CAVE for both MacOS and Windows, as well as a full EDEX installation for CentOS as well as continuing a Centos7 Virtual Machine option (available on both CentOS and Windows).

We have been supporting a publically accessible beta EDEX available at edex-beta.unidata.ucar.edu for v20. For each of the subsequent releases of the beta, we have encouraged users to submit bugs and issues using our reporting form. This has allowed us to track and address many user-identified problems.

Aside from AWIPS development, the team is proud to host our first AWIPS workshop at the 2024 AMS Student Conference in late January. We have also completed more than two consecutive years of releasing AWIPS Tips blogs every other week.

Questions for Immediate Committee Feedback

Do 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 our transition last summer, despite numerous issues 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 both production v18 and beta v20 EDEX servers which continue 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. We have been maintaining 4 of these “EDEX Systems” – a production v18, a backup v18, a production v20, and a backup/development v20.

Since the last status report, we’ve put out several beta releases of v20. Our latest release is version 20.3.2-0.4. A link to all of our AWIPS release notes can be found here. We have also put out a beta release of v20 python-awips.

Version 20 has some major upgrades in terms of dependent software, with the following significant packages:

For the beta, the AWIPS team has developed a new installation process for both MacOS and Windows operating systems. The CAVE application for both platforms now runs in a fully contained environment, meaning no additional downloads and no environment or user variable changes, unlike previous installs. We have also ported this streamlined installation back to our Windows installer for v18. Now we can guarantee consistency when it comes to the versions of Java and Python that are running when the user runs CAVE, all without interfering with the default host system.

Throughout the development cycles of the beta release, 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.

Since last summer, the AWIPS team has been successfully maintaining and updating our ISatSS installation which allows us access to the NOAA-created GLM products. This work has been assisted by Brian Rapp and Lee Byerle from NOAA.

As of the beginning of October, Unidata has come to an agreement with Synoptic Data to begin a data-sharing partnership with them. Out of this agreement, AWIPS is now accessing, decoding, and displaying RAWS data. This entire collaboration was prompted from a user request for RAWS data because of its importance in the field of wildfire response and management. The AWIPS team worked closely with our Data Systems team, and Data Engineer, Mike Zuranski, on this project.

A significant portion of our documentation both for CAVE, EDEX, and python-awips has been modified for easier understanding and comprehension. When the new version 20 of AWIPS goes live as the production version, we will have all new updates to documentation to make sure it reflects the most current version. 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 two 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 those who have never used CAVE and those who have but still might be fairly new to the software to sign up and try out the course for themselves.  Learn Python-AWIPS is tailored for users with entry level Python knowledge, and zero python-awips knowledge. The skills and knowledge gained from the course will hopefully allow the learners to then easily understand and alter our example notebooks to be able to produce customized, useful data plots. We are actively encouraging our University members to take the learning course themselves, and recommend it to their students as well. We know Python is growing in popularity in the meteorologic field and would like to offer this learning experience as a tool for professors and students to take advantage of.

The AWIPS team still has an active support evaluation survey that is advertised in our support email signatures. 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:

This next year, part of the AWIPS team will be attending AMS 2024. During the student conference we will be hosting a workshop on AWIPS and how it can be used in the classroom to prepare students for careers at the NWS and how it can benefit your school meteorology program. We will also be presenting a talk about the latest Unidata AWIPS updates.

The team has also received several requests in the recent past inquiring about workshops focused on the EDEX side of AWIPS. Most of these requests have come from either private companies or varying government agencies. The team is considering planning an EDEX workshop for sometime in the future.

Software Releases

Since our last status report we have put out three releases of the beta for version 20. These updates include new, streamlined installers for CAVE on MacOS and Windows, as well as full installations of EDEX available for RHEL7 (CentOS7). Additionally, we have put out a beta version of python-awips that is also compatible with our edex-beta.unidata.ucar.edu public v20 EDEX.

We are still finalizing the last few functionality and enhancement developments for version 20 before we push it to production and decommission our v18 releases and public EDEX. We are on track to move completely to v20 before the end of the year, and will be reaching out to our University labs with CAVE and EDEX installed to help them transition their machines over the winter break.

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 improving the current beta to release a production version of 20 before the end of the year. When this goes live, we will also update our python-awips package to have the latest v20 installation available on Conda and pip. Once we put out the production version of 20, we will be focusing on a new build that will be able to be installed on RHEL8 OS (as well as Rocky8) with newer versions of python. We are also looking forward to the opportunity of hosting an in-person student workshop at AMS 2024. The team is actively participating in conferences, workshops, and virtual message boards (blogs) to expand our user base.

Metrics

Downloads March 1, 2023 - September 30, 2023

AWIPS downloads: 5,192

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 October 2023