Weather Forecasting

Systems Architecture Needed for National Weather Service Modernization Gao ID: AIMD-94-28 March 11, 1994

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lacks a systems architecture, or overall blueprint, to guide the design, development, and evolution of the many subsystems comprising its $4 billion modernization of the National Weather Service's weather observing, information processing, and communications systems. This situation arose because NOAA officials have not managed the multiple subsystems as interrelated parts of a single system. As a result, incompatibilities have arisen among the subsystems, including different communication protocols and application languages. The modernization has never had a central manager or chief architect. Consequently, the subsystems continue to be developed and managed in largely the same manner as they were started--as individual systems that must be interconnected after development to meet National Weather Service requirements. Unless a single manager is appointed and an architecture is developed and enforced, the integration of these and potentially other new weather forecasting subsystems will continue to require more time, effort, and money than is necessary.

GAO found that: (1) NOAA lacks a systems architecture for the weather forecasting and warning system's modernization because it has not developed the multiple subsystems as integral parts of a single system; (2) one NOAA office has developed an architecture for its four subsystems, but that architecture is not applicable to the entire system; (3) incompatibilities among the subsystems have increased costs; (4) NOAA has developed special interfaces to overcome and interconnect the systems' different communications protocols; (5) the subsystems' different communications protocols, operating systems, and application languages complicate system upgrades and maintenance; (6) NWS plans to reallocate functions among the subsystems, but the subsystems' incompatibilities make information sharing and functional transfers difficult; (7) NOAA is considering shifting the systems to an open environment that is not vendor-dependent, but the subsystems must move to the same open system options; (8) NOAA continues to develop and manage subsystems independently because it has not assigned a central manager to the modernization; and (9) without a single management focus and a system architecture, integration of the subsystems will require more time, effort, and money than necessary.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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