Hi,
NWS here. If anyone is planning to be in DC for next week's conferences,
I'd encourage you to register to attend the NWS partners meeting. This will
be discussed. Unfortunately there is no virtual offering, but a summary,
slides, notes, and anything else captured will be uploaded afterwards here:
https://www.weather.gov/wrn/calendar
The System Pillar intends for this to be the first of many engagements on
these topics below.
NWS Partners,
We look forward to seeing you at the upcoming NWS Summer Partnership Meeting
on Monday, July 20, 2026, from 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM. If you haven’t yet,
please register here
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe6fIYTHwPxl3Ge8ViFfwH0AMqKrcYQCgeXyePlQSQ2iobG0w/viewform?usp=header>
!
As we prepare for the meeting, we'd like to share a few pre-meeting
resources and logistical details to help you prepare for the discussions
and plan for the event.
Agenda
When you arrive, please scan the QR code displayed to check in before the
meeting begins.
1:30 - 2:30pm: Leadership Presentations & Overviews
- Welcome, Introductions - Erica Cei
- Update on NWS Transformation Efforts - Ajay Mehta
- Status and Strategic Direction of NWS Observations - Tim Greten
- Status and Strategic Direction of NWS Systems - George Jungbluth
2:45 - 4:15pm: The remainder of the afternoon will consist of interactive,
rotating breakout discussions over the course of three sessions. This
format is designed to facilitate open dialogue on the technology, tools,
and strategic priorities underpinning current NWS transformation efforts.
Your feedback from these sessions will directly help inform future planning
and strengthen collaboration across the weather enterprise. Breakout focus
areas will include subject matter experts from:
- Commercial Data Program <https://nationalmesonet.us/welcome/>
- NOAA Weather Radio <https://www.weather.gov/nwr> (NWR)
- AWIPS Satellite Broadcast Network / NOAAPort
<https://www.weather.gov/noaaport/NOAAPort>
- RadarNext
<https://www.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/NOAA_Radar%20Next_%20One%20Pager_%20Revised_Final%20pdf.pdf>
- Weather.gov 2.0 <https://beta.weather.gov/roadmap/>
- HIVE/CIRRUS
<https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaas-national-weather-service-eyes-cloud-for-next-gen-applications>
4:15 PM - 4:30 PM: Closing & Wrap-up
Pre-Meeting Materials
To help make the most of our time together, we've included the following
materials for your reference before the meeting:
weather.gov 2.0 - The National Weather Service (NWS) is announcing a major
milestone in the development of a modernized Weather.gov experience
designed to better serve the American people and core partners, especially
during high-impact weather events. The updated website, now available in
beta form at beta.weather.gov, represents the first step toward the future
of Weather.gov — a mobile-friendly, accessible, and location-focused
platform built to help users quickly find and understand critical weather
information when every word and every minute matters. We need your feedback
as we iteratively develop this site.
NOAAPort / SBN - We use the Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN) to transfer
critical data and products between NWS offices. Partners use NOAAPort on
the SBN as a means to deliver our data and products to the weather
enterprise. With the move of our data and visualization tools into the
cloud and the sunset of the legacy SBN/AWIPS program, the NWS will no
longer support NOAAPort / SBN operations after late 2027 or early 2028. We
are committed to supporting timely and reliable dissemination of NWS data
to our partners. As we begin planning the follow-on to NOAAPort we would
like to share the latest information on our technology transformation and
gain insight from our partners on how they receive and use NWS data today
and what they are looking for in the future.
Transition to Common Alert Protocol (CAP) messages - CAP messages are
currently derived from watch, warning, and advisory text products. This
process introduces downstream latency, limits geospatial precision, and
requires maintenance of multiple standards. We are proposing to transition
to the CAP message as the primary source for watches, warnings, and
advisories to improve our products. In addition, we propose to discontinue
dissemination of the legacy text products. Feedback from partners on this
proposal would be appreciated.
NOAA Weather Radio - NOAA Weather Radio (NWR) has served the general public
and public safety officials for decades as a source of NWS alerts and
forecasts. With changes and advances in technology the NWR network and
system needs to be modernized and upgraded. The NWS is currently conducting
an engineering analysis for the future of NWR and ensuring current system
stability and reliability. We are also exploring other enterprise
capabilities and solicited public feedback in a recent user survey. Partner
feedback and ideas for the future of NWR will help us in our endeavor to
maintain NWR as a useful NWS dissemination outlet in the future.
Radar Next - The NWS Radar Next program launched in 2023 to strategically
plan and deploy the successor to the Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD)
capability. With the NEXRAD projected to fall below required availability
levels in the early 2030s, Radar Next is focused on delivering a modern
radar system that ensures data continuity, addresses existing coverage
gaps, and significantly improves data quality and performance. The future
radar network is envisioned to be a hybrid network that includes S-band
dish radars, complementary C-band dish radars, transportable PAR or dish
radars, and supplemental commercial data buys. We look forward to updating
our partners on the program’s current status and discussing the planned
approach for Radar Next acquisition activities.
HIVE/CIRRUS/Cloud - The NWS will highlight the transition from legacy AWIPS
to NWS HIVE, a highly comprehensive, cloud-based application environment
designed to serve as the foundation for modern operational forecasting.
Attendees will learn about NWS CIRRUS, a central data repository acting as
a single, verified "Source of Truth" ensuring all dissemination systems
leverage identical, high-quality datasets. Additionally, the presentation
outlines the development of the NWS Enterprise Cloud (NEC), which provides
the secure, resilient commercial cloud infrastructure and DevSecOps tools
necessary to host these workloads. The goal is to demonstrate how these
integrated platforms will drastically accelerate the pace of innovation and
improve operational efficiency. We welcome feedback and recommendations
from partners on these enterprise approaches.
Commercial Observations Program - NOAA and NWS continue to prioritize
procurement of observational data from commercial sources to greatly
supplement, complement, and augment its overall observing systems reach in
support of transforming NWS foundational observing systems and becoming
World Leader in NWP. In recent years, the NWS Commercial Observations
Program (COP), via its flagship National Mesonet Program has greatly
expanded the procurement of observational data to a wide variety of
observing systems types well beyond the commonly understood meaning of
“Mesonet.” In particular, beyond the original baseline of surface
observations from networks operated by the states and the private sector,
the Program now obtains data from commercial balloon networks, drifting
buoys, ground-based remote sensing, UAS, ground-based radars, and it
significantly expanding the procurement of aircraft-based observations from
commercial airlines, including installation of water vapor sensors on
aircraft in partner airlines. Beyond the purchase of data, the COP
includes scope for range of data related services provided by partners, for
ingest and utilization of the data in NWS operational systems (e.g., NWP,
ingest and dissemination functions). NWS seeks feedback from the
stakeholder community as it seeks to leverage the rapidly expanding
commercial data market into an end-to-end commercial solutions program
within NWS and in support of the weather enterprise.
Meeting Information
The meeting will be held at:
Grand Hyatt Washington
1000 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20001
Constitution AB Ballroom (Level 3B)
Carissa Klemmer
NWS Central Operations
Implementation & Data Services Division Chief
301-683-3835
On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 11:45 PM Sebenste, Gilbert <sebensteg@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> And, come to think of it, the satellite broadcast of that will go away
> when NOAAport goes away.
>
> Gilbert Sebenste
> Meteorology Support Analyst
> College of DuPage
>
> On Jul 8, 2026, at 9:58 PM, Rob Dale <rdale@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Don't forget that the NWWS remains a fast and free push service for NWS
> data.
>
> Rob
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* ldm-users <ldm-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of
> Sebenste, Gilbert <sebensteg@xxxxxxx>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, July 8, 2026 9:52 PM
> *To:* Mike Zuranski <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Cc:* LDM <ldm-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; NOAAPORT <
> noaaport@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Subject:* Re: [ldm-users] [External] Re: The end of NOAAport, the
> "cloud", and UNIDATA
>
> Mike,
>
> Thanks for replying on this. I could come up with something that could
> ping the servers once a minute to download the data...and possibly get a
> prompt IP ban in the process. People (not you, just the opposite) are not
> understanding the implications of all of this. At best, no NOAAport would
> delay data, including critical watches and warnings and advisories; at
> worst, the data would no longer be publicly available.
>
> Right now, this seems to be *somewhat* less of a political issue than a
> National Weather Service planning issue. I am OK with them going to the
> cloud for AWIPS as long as there's redundancy (think outages that have
> happened over the past several months to all providers). But for the
> private sector, the military sector, and the educational sector, we could
> be blown back decades with NOMADS being the only public source of NWS data.
> And I'm concerned that AWS, Yahoo and Google cloud and others that save NWS
> data could shut it off.Without a public onboarding to AWIPS, as of now, we
> only have models and webscraping for everything else, if those options
> remain open.
>
> Gilbert Sebenste
> Meteorology Support Analyst
> College of DuPage
>
> On Jul 8, 2026, at 4:25 PM, Mike Zuranski <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of COD’s system. Do not click
> links, open attachments, or respond with sensitive information unless you
> recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>
> Hi Gilbert and everyone,
>
> I too would like to hear from Unidata on this front.
>
> We've known the tentative end of NOAAPort/SBN has been coming for a while
> in the form of the Raytheon contract ending right about that same time,
> fall 2027. NWS is moving AWIPS into the cloud, as such will not need the
> SBN for WFOs anymore after that. Last I heard there is no on-ramp for
> partners into their cloud system, and I _believe_ the _hope_ was it would
> still stick around for another couple of years... but I have yet to hear
> any sort of mechanism for how that would actually continue.
>
> The best thing you and others in your position can do now is prepare and
> plan ahead for contingencies. Where else can you get data from? Using
> your NEXRAD2 example, that data is available on AWS, so is NEXRAD3, both
> managed by Unidata in fact: https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/
> As for other data, here's a solid place to start:
> https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets
>
> Actually, if any NWS/NOAA/NODD folks are on here (hello), is there any
> intel on this front that you could share? We would all greatly appreciate
> it I am sure.
>
> Hope everyone is doing well!
>
> Best,
> -Mike
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 5:02 PM Sebenste, Gilbert <sebensteg@xxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> This month’s edition of TV Technology magazine that I received today was
> pages and pages of their top story: C-band satellite, all 180 MHZ of it
> that remains, was being auctioned off to wireless/cell providers in July
> 2027, and it isn’t coming back once the auction is over. The C-Band
> spectrum is expected to sell for over $3 billion for 5G and 6G to wireless
> carriers.
>
> Broadcasters, who have used these frequencies reliably for decades to
> transmit news, entertainment and sporting events around the globe, and the
> government, transmitting weather data across NOAAport, must get off their
> channels soon after the auction concludes. Most pay TV networks have
> switched to IP-based/Internet transmission. Fox Sports, and sports networks
> had a panel discussion at the recent National Association of Broadcasters
> (NAB) meeting that was packed to the rafters, with people looking for
> reliable broadcast transmission solutions. The complaints that Internet
> delivery is nowhere near as reliable in the “final mile” as satellite
> transmission is, fell on deaf ears to the FCC. But what about the National
> Weather Service, NOAA and UNIDATA?
>
> While some, and maybe much, has been made of NOAA using AWIPS in the cloud
> by that time…the same cannot be said for what will happen to .edu’s and
> .com’s, and others who rely on C-Band for NOAAport data reception. The
> current FCC mantra is “YOU figure it out how you’ll get that data from
> point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. ”.
>
>
> We are just over one year out from all of this happening, and I am left in
> a lurch wondering what is going to happen next year. I want to be prepared.
> I cannot do this alone. There has been radio silence about this issue,
> except in UNIDATA annual meeting notes. The train is pulling into the
> station for cloud and IP-based delivery of data, and when it departs, how
> is UNIDATA, and how are we, going to be a part of that train?
>
> There is also concern about the loss of access to data. I’m hearing
> rumblings of Level 2 radar data being discontinued from NOMADS in the
> not-too-distant future. We use that in our classrooms extensively. Our
> https://weather.cod.edu web site uses the NOAAport feed for much of our
> data and imagery. I don’t want it to go dark in about a year. Does anyone
> have any answers at this point as to what will happen, and how this will be
> handled?
>
> With regards,
>
> Gilbert Sebenste
>
> Meteorology Support Analyst
>
> <image001.png>
>
>
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