Air Force taps Raytheon for next phase of weather forecasting project

The Air Force and Army plan to replace legacy weather systems with an integrated solution under the Joint Environmental Toolkit program.

Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., won a contract that could be worth as much as $71 million over 54 months for the second phase of the program. The initial contract value is $9.3 million.

The contract was awarded by Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass. The Raytheon-led team was awarded the first phase in July 2004.

The objective of the Joint Environmental Toolkit acquisition is to replace legacy weather systems with a single, integrated capability that provides tailored weather products to users, ties into command and control systems and implements the architecture for the Air Force Weather Weapon System.

The program is intended to meet Air Force and Army needs for weather forecast generation, meteorological watch, and observation management. What's more, the program is crucial to the construction of a network-centric environment that supports warfighting missions, Raytheon said.

Raytheon, which has 80,000 employees and had annual sales of $21.9 billion in fiscal 2005, ranks No. 7 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list of federal prime contractors.