Future Combat Systems Modeling and Simulation

Objective

To provide meteorological data for use in the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems Modeling & Simulation (FCS M&S), and to assist in testing military systems under realistic synthetic environments.

Description

The U.S. Army's FCS M&S provides distributed test environments for assessing military systems. Each test event involves about 10 ranges throughout the country, and the distributed test events (DTEs) are coordinated electonically. NCAR provides high-resolution weather data for certain ranges, using a time interval on the order of 5 minutes for accurate simulation.

NCAR generates 4DWX weather data by running the MM5 atmospheric model, converting this output to GRIB format, and delivering it to FCS M&S using the TENA communications protocol. The TENA (Test and training ENabling Architecture) standard has been mandated by the U.S. Department of Defense to facilitate communication between system components. 4DWX uses the TENA Middleware to publish weather data files to a FCS M&S listener, which in turn delivers more specific weather information to individual clients within the exercise.

Since then, NCAR has carried out a series of retrospective and real-time weather modeling support to FCS missions over US Army test ranges and regions abroad. NCAR has been continuously enhancing the 4DWX modeling technologies and exploring new products and capabilities that will better serve the FCS meteorological needs.

The 4DWX meteorological products are enhanced with celestial object positions, moon phase, solar and lunar illumination and soil moisture saturation computations for given regions and times of interest.