The Federal Aviation Administration and Raytheon Intelligence & Space, a Raytheon Technologies business, recently negotiated pricing for revised scope of the NextGen Weather Processor, or NWP, program, with $47.8 million in potential effort for the existing contract.
On April 1, the FAA executed a contract modification for $21.7 million to exercise Option Year 4 to continue work toward delivering improved weather data to ensure enhanced safety, security and efficiency of National Airspace System operations.
Under the contract, the RI&S team will continue development, testing, training and implementation of the NextGen Weather Processor to replace legacy FAA weather systems with a single advanced weather processor and a common Aviation Weather Display to increase safety and generate greater situational awareness. The system also includes an external web server that will provide consistent weather data to external aviation users, including flight service providers and airlines.
“The processing is done by RI&S’ NWP that, when complete, will be distributed throughout the National Airspace System including enroute centers and large terminal radar-controlled approach facilities,” said Denis Donohue, president, Surveillance & Network Systems, RI&S. “In addition, NWP can identify terminal and enroute weather safety hazards hours in advance to better support traffic flow-management and mitigate weather-related delays.”
Combining information from weather radars, environmental satellites, meteorological observations, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s numerical forecast model output, the fully automated NWP identifies terminal and enroute safety hazards and provides translated weather information needed to predict route blockage and airspace capacity constraints.
The total amount of the current option year is $21.7 million, and includes options that can extend the program performance until April 2025.
Raytheon Intelligence & Space works with the FAA to enhance weather systems
