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.