55 Broadway; Cambridge, MA 02142

D -- NATIONWIDE RADAR WEATHER DATA SERVICES SOL DTRS57-99-R-00017 DUE 042999 POC Point of Contact -- Susan Bertram, Administrative Contracting Officer, (617) 494-3816 WEB: Volpe Center Acquisition Division home page, http://www.volpe.dot.gov/procure/index.html. E-MAIL: Administrative Contracting Officer, bertram@volpe.dot.gov. This is not an Invitation for Bid, a Request for Proposal or a Request for Quotes. The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center is conducting market research, with the intention of issuing a solicitation in the near future for companies that have the capability to provide for continuous access to a radar weather data base, lightning data, alphanumeric text data, high resolution gridded model data, Echo Tops, STORMcast data and the distribution license of the data except lightning data. This data is important for the mission of the Federal Aviation Administration s Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). ETMS is an operational FAA system. It provides the means by which the FAA can monitor and control air traffic. A major component of ETMS is its weather overlay functions and backgro unds processing functions that requires access to operational weather data. To that end, the ETMS Aviation Weather Network (AWN) has been evolved over the years to receive, ingest and process weather data .The Mosaicradar data shall be of a minimum of 2km spatial resolution from all available NWS radar sites. The data shall contain 16 levels of radar reflectivity intensity. The data must be quality controlled prior to delivery to ETMS. A high-resolution product shall be available every 5 minutes with automated quality control algorithms. A medium-resolution product of 15-minute temporal resolution is required with manual quality control check. 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. 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. STORMcast provides the current position, speed and direction of storms from all NWS radar sites and is on the national scale. The data is updated every fiveminutes. All the required weather shall be provided to ETMS over a land-based communication circuit of at least 256BPS circuit and 1 Mbytes per second satellite network. All the data must be compatible with the existing ETMS AWN programs. The data must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The data shall be available for redistribution to other ET MS remote sites. The government will acquire the data, and the necessary distribution licenses except for lightning data, for a period of one-year base period and two one-year options. If interested and have the capability to provide all of the aforementioned services and data as required by the Government, please send company s name and qualifications within fifteen (15) working days after issuance of this source sought by mail or e-mail. Send to Volpe National Systems Center, Attn: Susan A. Bertram, DTS-853, 55 Broadway, Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02142-1093. E-Mail responses should be sent to bertram@volpe.dot.gov. Posted 04/14/99 (D-SN320099). (0104)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0037 19990416\D-0014.SOL)