NOAA Weather Radio/Broadcast Message Handler (NWR/BMH)

Steve Schotz

Office of Science and Technology/National Weather Service

BMH Project Manager/AWIPS Deputy Program Manager for Product Improvement

October 21, 2014

Agenda

• BMH Scope and Benefits• NWR System Overview• Project Schedule• Questions

BMH Scope and Benefits

• Objective:– Migrate NOAA Weather Radio (NWR), Console Replacement

System (CRS) functionality into AWIPS II infrastructure

• Benefits:– Leverages AWIPS Infrastructure and support to improve BMH

system robustness, availability and maintainability vs. CRS• Mitigates risk of depending on aged, custom CRS H/W and S/W

– Enables extensibility to allow for future enhanced capabilities– Transition to BMH transparent to NWR end users except

potentially improved voice quality

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• NOAA Weather Radio (NWR)• 24/7 broadcast of NWS and Federal products• ~1000 NWR transmitters in use• NWR receivers (radios) allow anyone to listen

• Hazard display• Alert tones (1050 Hz)• Auto on when critical warning products are broadcast

NWR Overview

NWR Overview

• Console Replacement System (CRS)• Currently used at WFOs• 15-20 year old hardware and software

• Maintainability challenges• Not extensible

CRS is outsideAWIPS boundary

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CRS Hardware (Legacy System)

AWIPS

AWIPS LAN bridge

Master MP

Shadow MP

VIP

FEPs4BKUP

Voice ProcessorACP

ASA

DX1 & DX2AWIPS

CRS

Gigabit Switch

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BMH Hardware

AWIPS

PX1 & PX2

Gigabit Switch

LX1...LXn

DX1 & DX2 ….

DAC 1

DAC 2

DAC n

100 megabitSwitch

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NWR/BMH Software Design

• Makes use of AWIPS II architecture– redundancy/failover (parallel ops on PX)– staff will be familiar with AWIPS II– less training– flexible/extensible/expandable

• Leverage existing AWIPS II code/packages– qpid– Alertviz– logging– GUIs/CAVE– Plug-in development

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BMH Schedule

• Software Development: January, 2015

• System Testing: January – March 2015

• Operational Test and Evaluation (OTE): April – July 2015

• Begin Deployment: September 2015

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Questions