Summary: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lacks a systems architecture, or overall blueprint, to guide the design, development, and evolution of the many subsystems comprising its $4 billion modernization of the National Weather Service's weather observing, information processing, and communications systems. This situation arose because NOAA officials have not managed the multiple subsystems as interrelated parts of a single system. As a result, incompatibilities have arisen among the subsystems, including different communication protocols and application languages. The modernization has never had a central manager or chief architect. Consequently, the subsystems continue to be developed and managed in largely the same manner as they were started--as individual systems that must be interconnected after development to meet National Weather Service requirements. Unless a single manager is appointed and an architecture is developed and enforced, the integration of these and potentially other new weather forecasting subsystems will continue to require more time, effort, and money than is necessary.
