Description
The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe Center) is seeking access to operational weather data required by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS), including but not limited to, radar mosaics of base reflectivity for the United States (U.S.), Canada, and San Juan and an echo tops mosaic for the U.S., lightning, alphanumeric text, high resolution gridded model data and the distribution license of the data except lightning data. This data set is important for the mission of ETMS. ETMS is an operational FAA system providing the means by which the FAA can monitor and control air traffic. A major component of ETMS is its weather overlay and backgrounds processing functions that require access to operational weather data. To that e nd, the ETMS Aviation Weather Network (AWN) has been developed and evolved over the years to receive, ingest and process the required weather data set from Weather Service International Corporation (WSI). The Volpe Center is seeking capability information in the form mentioned under Capability Requirements below. This is not a request for competitive proposals or qualifications. The information must show that any interested party has the ability to provide the requisite services, data and operational support that meet the following Government requirements: The Contractor shall provide the weather data in a digital stream for direct input into the ETMS AWN. The Contractor shall transmit the data to ETMS Hub site and its designated Disaster Recovery Hub site via non-Internet, reliabl e, robust, independent and dual-redundant communication links, at least one of which must be a land-based circuit with sufficient bandwidth to carry all weather data required by ETMS. All the data must be compatible with the existing ETMS application programs such as the AWN, Traffic Situation Display (TSD), and the ETMS flight modeling program. The U.S. radar data mosaics shall be of a minimum of 2km spatial resolution from all available National Weather Service radar sites. The data shall contain 16 levels of radar reflectivity intensity. The data must be quality controlled prior to delivery to ETMS. A version shall be available every 5 minutes with automated quality control algorithms. A product of 15-minute temporal resolution is required with manual quality control check. The Canadian radar mosaic shall be of 2km spatial resolution and 15-minute temporal resolution on the national scale. The Contractor must receive this data from Environment Canada via a direct, dedicated communications circuit. Internet access to the Canadian data is not acceptable. Echo tops shall contain the highest detected echoes above a given location. The data shall be of 4km spatial resolution and is updated every 10 minutes. The data is on the national scale. ETMS TSD software requires that radar mosaics are run-length encoded. Lightning data shall contain time, location, polarity and amplitude of flashes and shall be from a continuous data feed. The data shall be accurate to within 10km or less over the contiguous 48 states. The data shall be on the national scale. The data must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and shall be available for redistribution to other ETMS remote sites currently receiving the data from the Volpe ETMS Hub site and other additional sites designated by the Volpe Hub site in the future. The Government will acquire the requisite service, data, and the necessary distribution licenses, for a period of one base year period and four one-year options. Capability Requirements All responsible sources may respond to this SOURCES SOUGHT NOTICE and responses will be fully considered by the Agency. Interested firms are required to demonstrate that its weather data is compatible with ETMS by supplying a sample data set in a CD ROM at no cost to the Government, of the radar mosaics of base reflectivity for the U .S., Canada and San Juan, an echo tops mosaic for the U.S., 40 km Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) 236, MESO-Eta and global 1-degree AVN and two (2) copies of descriptive documentation in sufficient detail, do not include any pricing information, to allow an evaluation of a bonafide capability to satisfy the Government’s requirements within fifteen (15) calendar days of publication of this notice. Please send documentation to: USDOT/Volpe Center, Attn: Donald MacGee, DTS-853, 55 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142-1093.