AWIPS II+: An Open-Source SOA Solution Enabling Environmental Remote Sensing Integration, Analysis, and Decision Support

Our shared future demands a renewed focus on sound environment stewardship-on the GEOSS socioeconomic imperatives, as well as the interdisciplinary relationships interconnecting our environment, climate, ecosystems, energy, carbon, water-and national security. Data volumes are now measured in the many petabytes. An increasingly urgent and accelerated tempo of changing requirements and responsive solutions demands data exploitation, and transparent, seamless, effortless, bidirectional, and interdisciplinary interoperability across models and observations. There is today a robust working paradigm established with the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS)-NOAA/NWS's information integration and fusion capability. This process model extends vertically, and seamlessly, from environmental sensing through the direct delivery of societal benefit. NWS, via AWIPS, is the primary source of weather forecast and warning information in the nation. AWIPS is the tested and proven "the nerve center of operations" at all 122 NWS Weather Forecast Offices and 13 River Forecast Centers. Raytheon, in partnership with NOAA, has now evolved AWIPS into an open-source 2nd generation capability to satisfy climate, ecosystems, weather, and water mission goals. Just as AWIPS II supports NOAA decision- making, it is at the same time a platform funded by Raytheon IRAD and Government investment that can be cost-effectively leveraged across all of the GEOSS and IEOS societal benefit areas. The core principles in the AWIPS II evolution to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) were to minimize coupling, increase cohesion, minimize size of code base, maximize simplicity, and incorporate a pull-style data flow. We focused on "ilities" to drive the new AWIPS architecture-our shared architecture framework vision included six elements: - Create a new, low-cost framework for hosting a full range of environmental services, including thick-client visualization via virtual Earth's and GIS - Scale down framework to a small laptop and through workstations to clusters of enterprise servers without software change - "Plug-n-play"- plug-ins can be hot deployable, or system cycled to pick up new plug-ins - Base the framework on highly reusable design patterns that maximize reuse and have datatype independence and fast adaptability - Open Source leveraged to maximize reuse - "Gaming-style" interaction with the data This talk addresses the challenges that we meet to realize benefits in applications that couple environmental data from many disparate remote sensing and ancillary sources and disciplines. By leveraging the existing AWIPS II weather, water, ecosystems, and climate functionality and these six elements, along with well- thought-out displays with the end user's specific needs in mind, we demonstrate an easily adapted, extremely powerful, open-source remote sensing software tool that will help non-geospatial-experts make better use of these remote sensing resources to enhance environmental mapping and analysis and help guide environmental decision making at the national, regional, local and citizen levels.