Nowcast for the Next Generation Navy is a project at the Naval Research
Laboratory (NRL) to develop a nowcasting system (called Nowcast) for the Navy.
The development of the Nowcast system is sponsored by the Office of Naval
Research (ONR), with contributions from the Oceanographer of the Navy (Space and
Naval Warfare Systems Command and the Commander, Naval Meteorology and
Oceanography Command), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The complexity of the naval battlespace necessitates the automated fusion of
environmental information to maintain a consistent database of the Virtual
Natural Environment (VNE). The battlegroup of today has limited capability to
sample the environment, has no capability to efficiently fuse the sparse
information that is available, nor does it have the ability to share a common,
consistent representation of the VNE among its components.
The Nowcast system is being developed with input from an Integrated Product
Team (IPT) to provide the organic battlegroup VNE database and end-user products
based on the data. The Nowcast system is an enterprise-class, network-centric,
data fusion system that will allow the forward-deployed battlegroup to
automatically and continuously fuse meteorological data from available sources
to characterize the battlespace environment.
The Nowcast system will continuously transmit updated products directly to
warfighters in the battlegroup within a common situational awareness framework
and will allow them to organize and tailor the products to their specific
warfighting requirements. Another goal of the Nowcast project is to automate
meteorological data quality control and to provide the decision-maker with a
measure of product confidence based on a real-time verification system.
