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General Dynamics Information Technology received a $22.2 million contract from the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) to support the Naval Integrated Tactical Environmental System Next Generation (NITES-Next) program. The contract has a potential value of $67.7 million over 5 years if all options are exercised.

General Dynamics will design, develop, integrate, test and support the deployment of NITES-Next, which uses software to display meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) information on Navy mission-planning and command and control (C2) systems. NITES-Next is a follow-on system to the Navy’s NITES…

NITES [pdf] was reengineered from the Tactical Environmental Surveillance System (TESS) and other legacy systems of the early 1990s. NITES systems have the capabilities to ingest, process, fuse, display, and disseminate METOC information and its impact on tactical operations.

The NITES-Next is intended to increase the capabilities for ashore, afloat and mobile METOC support to naval tactical operations and be interoperable with the other services. The NITES-Next has 4 components:

• tactical applications,
• forecaster’s toolkit,
• data services package, and
• the ability to collect METOC information through organic sensors for rapid environment analyses.

NITES-Next uses geographic information systems (GIS), support physics-based modeling and implement an advanced database design. NITES-Next will make METOC products available across the US Department of Defense’s Global Information Grid (GIG) and the Navy FORCEnet. The GIG is a globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities and processes for collecting, processing, and managing information for US troops, policymakers, and support personnel.

General Dynamics will performed the work on NITES-Next in Newport, RI; San Diego, CA; and Bay St. Louis, MI.