CHAPTER 1 Introduction

In August of 1996, the National Weather Service senior management decided to immediately begin exploring ways to quickly exploit the capabilities of the WFO-Advanced system. A primary objective of this activity was to determine what would be required in order to make many of the WFO-Advanced functions available to NWS field offices earlier than previously planned via the current AWIPS schedule. To help understand the impacts of this decision on AWIPS development, schedule, cost, and plans, PRC was tasked with looking into the issues and quickly presenting their findings.

As part of this Task Order, FSL was asked to host a technical exchange session with a small group of engineers and others from both the AWIPS contractor and the government. The intent of this meeting was to promote a better understand of the design, software architecture, and implementation details of the WFO-Advanced system. This meeting was held September 17, 18, and 19, 1996. Participants included staff of FSL, PRC, NWS, and AAO.

A detailed summary of these nearly 3 days of meetings is included in the following document.

Some chapters have been modified to reflect changes in the system as FSL's software has evolved into AWIPS Builds 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0. Notably, Chapter 5a (so numbered for simplicity in updating the document) was added 1 October 1997, describing the complete re-write of the interprocess communication mechanism effected in mid-1997. In all cases, the date of most recent changes (with chapter-level granularity) is reflected at the bottom of each page.

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction

This document is maintained by Joe Wakefield. Last updated 2 Oct 97.