2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

unning at NWS and a backup at the Global Systems
Division (GSD). The IOC system at NWS is a distributed
MADIS architecture between the NWS Telecommunications
Operations Center (TOC) and NCEP Central Operations
(NCO). There is a supporting research-to-operations
test and backup capacity at the Oceanic and Atmospheric
Research’s (OAR) GSD. OAR’s Earth System Research
Laboratory (ESRL) GSD office continues to sustain both the
GSD MADIS and NWS systems throughout the transition
phase in order to support NOAA customers.
Milestone 2. Port FX-Collaborate drawing tool software to
AWIPS II.
The port of FX-Collaborate (a weather collaboration program)
functionality to the Advanced Weather Interactive
Processing System II (AWIPS II) involves the addition of
a drawing tool in order to allow weather forecasters the
ability to produce annotated products. The latter might
include, for example, a cold front line, text explaining
various features, shaded shapes representing warning areas,
etc. The previous-generation AWIPS system required
that forecasters use another tool, FX-Collaborate, in order
to create such annotated products. AWIPS II integrates
the drawing capability into the core software.
In the last year, the previously existing rough prototype
of the AWIPS II drawing tool was refined and rewritten
to create a nearly production-ready application. This
involved a number of steps, including ensuring that the
drawing tool could handle various AWIPS II events (pane
swapping, toggling the editable property, mouse-based
input over the layer labels, etc.); fixing memory leaks that
could cause slow performance or crashes; successive upgrades
of the drawing tool to match new capabilities and
limitations of new versions of the core AWIPS II software
98 CIRES Annual Report 2011
suite as the latter became available; the creation of a page
of relevant options to the AWIPS II Preferences dialog
box; and the addition of new editing actions (dynamic
rotation of drawable objects, creation of configurable
background rectangles for text, etc.)
The result is a CAVE (Common AWIPS Visualization
Environment) plug-in providing nearly all the functionality
of the FX-Collaborate drawing tool, as well as
new enhancements, all integrated into the core AWIPS II
software.
Screenshot of the CAVE drawing tool plug-in in action. The user has used
the drawing tool to annotate weather products, such as the satellite
image serving as a background. A yellow cloud shape, sun and arrow
symbols, text and three fronts have been added.