PolsterWorks specializes in helping our customers deploy AWIPS II within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, providing real time decoding and ingestion of NOAAPort meteorological data for ultimate visualization on CAVE workstations. AWIPS is a free, open-source solution.
CAVE (Common AWIPS Visualization Environment) is the primary graphical user interface for AWIPS II, the National Weather Service’s open-source meteorological software suite. CAVE enables forecasters and researchers to visualize, analyze, and interact with real-time weather data including radar, satellite, model outputs, and surface observations.
CAVE connects to an EDEX server to access decoded and processed data, offering advanced tools for geographic overlays, time series, vertical cross-sections, and forecast model comparisons. It is designed to run only on RHEL-based Linux distributions (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS) and requires NVIDIA graphics hardware for proper rendering performance.
As part of the publicly funded AWIPS II system, CAVE is open source and free to the public, making it an ideal solution for universities, research institutions, and organizations that need access to operational-grade weather visualization tools.
AWIPS II represents the gold standard in operational meteorology. Trusted by the U.S. National Weather Service and developed for mission-critical forecasting, it exemplifies excellence in real-time data integration, analysis, and visualization. Few systems rival its capability, scope, and reliability.
AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System), specifically AWIPS II, is a public-domain, open-source software platform developed by Raytheon under contract with the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS). It was funded by U.S. federal tax dollars to serve as the operational backbone for meteorological data processing, analysis, and visualization across NWS offices.
AWIPS II is designed to ingest, decode, and display real-time weather, satellite, radar, and environmental data. It supports forecasters by integrating diverse data sources into a unified interface for situational awareness and decision-making. The system includes key components such as EDEX (Environmental Data EXchange) for server-side data management and CAVE (Common AWIPS Visualization Environment) as the user-facing client interface.
Because AWIPS II was publicly funded, it is free to use, open source, and made available in the public domain. This enables other government agencies, research institutions, and private-sector users to adopt, extend, and deploy AWIPS II for their own meteorological and environmental data workflows.
Plectra provides turnkey installation of AWIPS II v23.4.2 — including the EDEX server and remote CAVE desktops — fully deployed in your AWS Cloud account.
Our default setup uses a single AWS EC2 instance to host both EDEX and CAVE, making it simple and cost-effective to get started.
Need more capacity? We’ll help you choose an EC2 instance type that matches your team’s workflow and the number of concurrent CAVE users.
To deploy AWIPS II in the cloud, the following are required:
Meteorological data sources provide the essential observational and model data used in weather analysis and forecasting. These sources include surface observations, satellite imagery, radar data, and numerical weather prediction model outputs. The data originates from authoritative organizations such as NOAA’s NCEP, NESDIS, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL).
Data is disseminated through systems like the NOAAPort Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN), which is used by National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs). For universities and research institutions, real-time data access is commonly provided via the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network. For others, services like AllisonHouse.com offer access to similar datasets for a subscription fee.
The Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) is an open-source software package developed by the Unidata Program Center at UCAR. It is designed for the real-time distribution of meteorological data, such as model outputs, radar imagery, and satellite observations. LDM uses an efficient, event-driven architecture to receive and relay large volumes of data across a network of peer systems.
LDM is free to use, freely available under an open-source license, and widely adopted by universities, research institutions, and government agencies as part of the NOAAPort and IDD (Internet Data Distribution) networks.
The EDEX Server (Environmental Data EXchange) is the data ingestion, processing, and distribution engine at the core of AWIPS II, the National Weather Service’s open-source meteorological software suite. EDEX handles real-time data streams—including satellite imagery, radar, model outputs, and surface observations—and delivers them to client applications like CAVE for visualization and analysis.
EDEX stores decoded data using a combination of PostgreSQL (for metadata and database queries) and HDF5 (for efficient storage of gridded and binary datasets). The system is designed to run exclusively on RHEL-based Linux distributions (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS).
As part of the publicly funded AWIPS II system, EDEX is open source, free to the public, and widely used by universities, researchers, and organizations needing high-performance meteorological data workflows.
Specialization:
Meteorological data ingestion, visualization, and AWIPS II deployment on AWS.
Principal / Owner: Evan Polster
Email: evan.polster@gmail.com
Website: polsterworks.com
(Typical response time: within 1 business day.)