Meteorological and Atmospheric Systems

For more than a quarter of a century, Noblis has been providing cutting-edge engineering, science, and program management support to the acquisition and evolution of the critical systems used to meet the National Weather Service (NWS) mission of providing severe weather forecast and warning. Now, in the early years of the 21st century, Noblis continues to break new ground as we work with our clients to evolve and enhance NWS systems to enable more accurate and timely forecasts, while minimizing costs to the taxpayer.

As Mark Twain noted, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Although we cannot do anything about the weather, with the application of science and technology, we can improve our ability to protect life and property and to assist the public in planning, conducting, and enjoying their daily lives. We have embraced the challenge of bringing lifesaving technology into national operational use by helping to provide the public with critical warnings of tornadoes, hurricanes, and other severe weather. The following accomplishments can be attributed to our efforts with NWS and our own corporate-sponsored research:

• Acquisition of the first national Doppler weather radar system to be deployed and operated throughout the United States
• Open Systems Architecture definition and development of cost-effective replacements for proprietary system components
• Enterprise view for evolving NWS systems within the context of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems
• Novel technique for speeding and simplifying transition of new science to operations through the Common Operations and Development Environment

Noblis engineers and scientists work with our clients to clearly define needs addressing service improvements and scientific and technological opportunities.

Doppler Weather Radar Evolution

In addition to meeting these challenges, the government must accomplish these goals in a time of strict budgets. The Noblis-developed open systems architecture for the NEXRAD (Next Generation Weather Radar) Doppler radar system addresses these goals. After developing and deploying open systems replacements to the major NEXRAD subsystems, the government will have modern platforms upon which to build advanced algorithms for improving the data resolution and quality of the Doppler radar data.

A future Dual Polarization capability will add a completely new dimension to radar meteorology and potentially to homeland security concerns. Noblis provides research and program planning efforts for Dual Polarization and will also support the acquisition and scientific development efforts.

Noblis is currently working with the NWS to leverage the NEXRAD advanced architecture to integrate the data from other government radar systems; ultimately, the NWS hopes to integrate data from Canada and Mexico as well. These data are supplemental to the primary NEXRAD data and have already been put to use to provide more accurate and timely warnings of severe weather without incurring major expense to the taxpayer.

Beginning with our support to the Joint Doppler Operation Project in 1979, Noblis has provided acquisition, scientific research, and systems engineering support to the evolution of the NWS weather radar program. We supported requirement verification and validation activities from the component through the system level. We also performed numerous technical and program support studies during this acquisition, including utilization of commercial T1 communications service versus a proprietary system.

In its support to the NWS, Noblis' staff have made major contributions in the development of the NEXRAD system. Working with the program office since its inception, we helped establish system requirements, analyzed design alternatives, and assessed system performance. We are taking a lead role in NEXRAD evolution activities as the system is being upgraded to support new advanced algorithms and to use current processing technology and software tools and techniques.

Transition of Weather Research to Operations

Noblis also provides acquisition and engineering support to the government to help them realize their goals of streamlining technology transfer into the operational baseline. We helped develop and evaluate radar applications in an environment identical to the operational radar. To meet this goal, we developed a prototype and helped develop an architecture that isolated the maintenance and evolution of the system services from the scientific applications. This architecture supports the development of new meteorological products independent of the evolution of the radar product generation computer system.

Requirements Management Support

Noblis is supporting the development of a NOAA-wide observing system architecture. The initial step is to create a roadmap that ensures a rational, traceable, and efficient allocation of user requirements. Our engineering knowledge of formal requirements definition and acquisition, our experience in applying this knowledge to solve our clients’ problems, and our understanding of NOAA’s organization and missions made Noblis the logical candidate for this effort. Working with NOAA, we have developed a process to identify, collect, standardize, prioritize, validate, consolidate, and update NOAA's environmental observing requirements. Noblis worked with the NWS to apply the NOAA model to its own needs, creating the NWS Operations and Services Improvement Process (OSIP).

Distributed Development

As computer systems become more complex and as the expertise to enhance and evolve them becomes more geographically dispersed, technology to support distributed development has become essential to the continuing evolution of systems while meeting the government’s budget and time constraints. Our work for NOAA and our own internal research have resulted in software and architectural innovations that facilitate this development paradigm.

Advanced Development for Weather Systems

Agricultural and disaster management agencies can also benefit from advanced reporting capabilities for weather-related conditions. Noblis research projects are developing tools that will integrate context-specific data into a format that provides users thorough and timely information to aid in strategic planning.