ALBERT

Description: In 2012, the Experimental Products Development Team (EPDT) was formed within NASA's Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center to create training for development of plugins to extend the National Weather Service (NWS) Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) version 2. The broader atmospheric science community had a need for AWIPS II development training being created at SPoRT and EPDT was expanded to include other groups who were looking for training. Since the expansion of the group occurred, EPDT has provided AWIPS II development training to over thirty participants spanning a wide variety of groups such as NWS Systems Engineering Center, NWS Meteorological Development Laboratory, and several NOAA Cooperative Institutes. Participants within EPDT solidify their learning experience through handson learning and by participating in a "code-sprint" in which they troubleshoot existing and develop plugins. The handson learning workshop is instructor lead with participants completing exercises within the AWIPS II Development Environment. During the code sprints EPDT groups work on projects important to the community and have worked on various plugins such as an RGB image recipe creation tool, and an mPing (crowd sourced precipitation type reporting system) ingest and display. EPDT has developed a welldefined training regime which prepares participants to fully develop plugins for the extendible AWIPS II architecture from ingest to the display of new data. SPoRT has hosted 2 learning workshops and 1 code sprint over the last two years, and continues to build and shape the EPDT group based on feedback from previous workshops. The presentation will provide an overview of EPDT current and future activities, and best practices developed within EPDT.