1. 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 *

2. Agenda
BMH Scope and Benefits
NWR System Overview
Project Schedule
Questions

3. BMH Scope and Benefits Objective: Benefits:
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

4. NWR Overview ~1000 NWR transmitters in use
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

5. NWR Overview Console Replacement System (CRS) Currently used at WFOs
15-20 year old hardware and software
Maintainability challenges
Not extensible
CRS is outside
AWIPS boundary

6. CRS Hardware (Legacy System)

7. BMH Hardware
100 megabit
Switch

8. 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

9. BMH Schedule Software Development: January, 2015
System Testing: January – March 2015
Operational Test and Evaluation (OTE): April – July 2015
Begin Deployment: September 2015

10. Questions