Plectra Earth Technologies

CAVE (Common AWIPS Visualization Environment) is the primary graphical user interface for AWIPS, 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 system, CAVE is open source and free to the public. Its Linux and graphics requirements are the reason it is rarely installed on an office laptop, and the reason Plectra AWIPS Cloud delivers it as a remote desktop: each meteorologist gets a CAVE workstation with its own GPU, reached from a browser.

AWIPS 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), formerly known as AWIPS, 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 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 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 for their own meteorological and environmental data workflows.

Plectra deploys and operates a complete AWIPS platform on dedicated cloud infrastructure and runs it for you under a fixed annual price. There is no hardware to buy, no software to install, and no cloud account to administer.

• Deployment. The EDEX data server, the data relay, the remote CAVE desktops, and a separate test environment, built and configured to your requirements and accepted before the term begins.
• Operations. Daily monitoring of the system and the data ingest, Linux and cloud administration, patching, backups, security monitoring, and AWIPS configuration management.
• Support. Response commitments by severity: a service outage or stopped ingest is engaged within one hour, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Plectra keeps its own seats on your platform, so a problem is diagnosed where it happened.
• Currency. The platform is kept on a current, supported AWIPS release. Each new release is assessed, built, validated in the test environment, and promoted under control.
• Assurance. Vendor security questionnaires, evidence of controls, and annual review, handled as part of the service.

• Meteorologist desktops. A fixed number of concurrent CAVE seats, each with its own dedicated GPU and 32 GB of memory, reached from a browser or a native client over an encrypted connection. No VPN and no changes to your network.
• Resilience. Desktops are spread across three separate cloud availability zones, so a failure in one facility affects only a share of the seats.
• Data ingest, around the clock. A dedicated EDEX server and a dedicated relay run 24 hours a day, drawing from redundant upstream feeds. The NOAAPort broadcast does not retransmit, so the relay is built not to miss it.
• Data. The NOAAPort data stream that feeds National Weather Service forecast offices, plus the national MRMS radar suite from NOAA's Open Data archive: models, radar, satellite, observations, and the full watch, warning and advisory stream, delivered over a geographic domain agreed with you before the term begins.
• A product catalogue. Every product by name, with its update cadence and expected latency to the desktop, provided at contract so there is no ambiguity about what is included.
• A test environment. Changes are validated on a mirror of production before they reach your operational system.

Very little. The service is designed so that nothing is installed on your equipment.

• A standard desktop or laptop for each meteorologist, with a current web browser or the native remote-desktop client, and an ordinary internet connection.
• A three-button mouse, which CAVE requires.
• The number of concurrent seats your team needs, and the geographic area and products they work with. These are agreed before the term begins and define the platform.

You do not need a cloud account, a Linux administrator, a VPN, or any change to your network. Plectra carries the infrastructure and the operating risk.

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).

The National Weather Service distributes this data to its forecast offices over the NOAAPort Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN). Outside the NWS, the same feed reaches universities through the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network, and reaches everyone else through commercial relays such as AllisonHouse, which draw on Unidata. Separately, NOAA publishes model output and the national MRMS radar suite on public cloud storage through its Open Data Dissemination program, at no charge and under no licence.

Plectra draws on both. A dedicated relay receives the NOAAPort feed from redundant upstream servers, and a bridge pulls model and radar products directly from NOAA Open Data. The NWS is consulting on retiring the SBN, so the ingest is built around more than one distribution path and does not depend on any single one.

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. Plectra's data relay is an LDM, fed from redundant upstream servers, kept deliberately simple so that it is the most reliable component in the platform.

The EDEX Server (Environmental Data EXchange) is the data ingestion, processing, and distribution engine at the core of AWIPS, 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 system, EDEX is open source and free to the public. In Plectra AWIPS Cloud, EDEX runs on a dedicated server that Plectra operates, ingesting data 24 hours a day and serving every CAVE desktop on the platform.

Specialization:
Plectra AWIPS Cloud: the National Weather Service's forecasting platform, deployed and operated for your team.

Legal entity: Plectra LLC, Colorado. Plectra Earth Technologies is its registered trade name.

Principal / Owner: Evan Polster

Email: evan.polster@plectrawx.com

Website: plectrawx.com

(Typical response time: within 1 business day.)