Mission
The Joint Environmental Toolkit meets Air Force and Army needs for weather forecast generation, meteorological watch, and observation management with increased accuracy and decreased latency as compared to legacy systems. JET substantially enhances battlespace awareness by ensuring accurate weather data reaches warfighters while also saving time and money.
Features
JET provides users with a single, fully integrated system of weather analyses, forecasting and dissemination capabilities. It assists users in characterizing the environment, stores information for use in Air and Space Operations Centers, incorporates weather information with Army decision making processes and integrates and exploits weather at strategic, operational and tactical levels.
By providing an integrated weather system capable of producing comprehensive real-time weather assessments, JET enables users to create, access, modify and transmit mission-critical local, regional and global environmental data to warfighters at all echelons of command. These weather assessments include site observations, tailored mission execution forecasts, flight weather briefings and active weather watches, warnings and advisories.
All stratums of military users, from Joint Operations Centers, to individual maintainers on the flight line, to physical fitness test managers at the base fitness center, can view necessary weather data.
Background
The Raytheon Company was awarded the Phase One contract for JET in 2004 by the JET Program Office located at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts. JET was created as a need to replace a variety of hybrid legacy weather systems, to include the Operational Weather Squadron Production System Phase II, Joint Weather Impact System, Product Generation Server & Scheduler and the New Tactical Forecast System. JET Increment 1 was created as a single, integrated weather system capability, delivering a common environmental toolkit across the weather enterprise.
Raytheon was awarded the final Phase Two contract for JET in October 2005. In July 2008, JET Increment 2 was released to be fielded at 230 locations around the world, replacing Increment 1. JET Increment 2 supports and improves upon machine-to-machine interfacing and expediting data exchange that historically has relied on antiquated manual or fax data exchange. Increment 2 also focuses on weather exploitation tools, visualization of data and effects, and is now the standard for production and dissemination of weather information to supported forces.
General characteristics:
Primary function: Air Force’s primary weather toolkit and meteorological dissemination system
Contractor: The Raytheon Company
Number of users: Can support 3,000 simultaneous users
Products generated: Hazard charts, drop zones, range and aerial refueling track forecasts; fine-scale target forecasts; airfield forecasts; and weather warnings, watches, and advisories
(Current as of July 2016)