The Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) is a free public service produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) with funding provided by the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP) and the NextGen Network Enabled Weather (NNEW) program. The ADDS websites result from the dedication of a handful of scientists and engineers at NCAR and NOAA.

History

ADDS was born out of the RAP weather web site, originally created by NCAR meteorologist Greg Thompson in the 1990s. For several years, the site was deployed exclusively at NOAA's Aviation Weather Center (AWC) in Kansas City, MO. In 2003, the AWC site was designated as "Operational ADDS" and a new "Experimental ADDS" site was created at NCAR. Since then, new research and technology has been demonstrated first on Experimental ADDS, before being transferred to Operational ADDS.

Sites

Experimental ADDS

This is not the Operational ADDS website. It is located at http://aviationweather.gov/adds. All of the products on that website have been approved as "Operational" by the FAA and the NWS and may be used as supplementary information for flight planning. The Operational ADDS website is monitored by NOAA staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is deployed in 3 separate geographic locations across the United States for load balancing and redundancy. As a measure of its reliability, the Operational ADDS website was certified by the FAA in 2009, as a Qualified Internet Content Provider (QICP).

The Experimental ADDS website is the one you are currently viewing. Many of the products on this site are identical to those on the Operational website, but others are next-generation products in the process of being certified "Operational" by the FAA. The FAA Aeronautical Information Manual, states that experimental products should not be used for flight related decisions.

Experimental ADDS is operated by the ADDS development team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. The site is designed with load balancing and redundant hardware to be extremely reliable, but it is NOT guaranteed to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Experimental ADDS is only monitored by staff during normal business hours and is only installed in a single geographic location. In the event of the loss of our data feed, a massive equipment failure, or damage to the building infrastructure, the site could be unavailable for an extended period. Please use Experimental ADDS for our innovative services, but do not rely on us as your sole source of aviation weather.

Team

The Experimental ADDS team is comprised of the following individuals.

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  Arnaud Dumont

  Arnaud has been developing decision support systems for over 15 years for such varied domains as aviation, surface transportation, wind energy, and riverbasin management. His passion is improving how people interact with information to accomplish their work.

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  Minna Win

  Minna joined the ADDS team from NOAA in the late spring of 2010, where she worked on NNEW (Next Generation Network Enabled Weather) and the Text Data Server.

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  Paddy McCarthy

  Paddy likes METARs, PIREPs, holding hands, and long walks on the beach. He does not enjoy writing short bios about himself.

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  Aaron Braeckel

  Aaron is a software engineer who primarily works on the ADDS Text Data Server and Java displays. He enjoys thinking about thinking about recursion.