The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UWM) offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in the atmospheric sciences. The program, which consists of 7 faculty and approximately 15 graduate and 30 undergraduate students, prepares students for career pursuits by stressing breadth of knowledge in course studies in the various sub-fields of atmospheric science and the development of quantitative thinking through a unique emphasis on the mathematical and computational aspects of the discipline. In addition, the program offers students real operational experience through the Innovative Weather Program (IW), where students provide weather-based decision support for paying community clients. Through IW and other initiatives, the program maintains strong ties with regional employers in both the private sector and the National Weather Service, where many of our recent graduates have been placed.
Computational resources in the program include a weather lab for scientific visualization, access to a campus high performance computing service for large jobs (such as running ensemble versions of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in real-time and research modes), and a fully equipped forecast facility. Prior to 2012-13, however, the program was unable to be an active participant in the Unidata community.
Funding from the 2012 Unidata Community Equipment Award program supported the installation of the RAMADDA scientific content management system, the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and Local Data Manager (LDM) software. Using award funds, we purchased a Dell PowerEdge T710 server, featuring a six-core Intel Xeon E5649 2.53GHz processor, 48 GB RAM, eight 2 TB hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration, five years of hardware support, and an uninterruptible power supply. Approximately 12 TB of disk space are dedicated to sharing current and archived data obtained via LDM; local model output from both deterministic and ensemble model systems; case study analyses; and data obtained as part of students' thesis and dissertation research.
The new server also has the GEMPAK suite of programs installed, and is being used to create new real-time products. There is a developing synergy at UWM between the pure academic setting of our classrooms and laboratories and the weather forecast decision support of IW, which has been facilitated by the Unidata technology. The products and data generated will be used in “Introduction to Weather Analysis and Forecasting,” a class to be offered to our students for the first time in Spring 2014. Additionally, we are now in the process of revising our Synoptic and Mesoscale Meteorology courses to take advantage of this new resource.
“Thanks to the generous funding from Unidata for this equipment and with the help of Professor Evans and our students, the UWM Atmospheric Sciences program will now be able to share with the Unidata community the interesting data and case studies that we develop as part of our academic mission,” says Professor Roebber.
Funding agencies are placing increasing emphasis on making data produced as a part of grant-supported research available to others. With this trend in mind, we used award funds to establish two publicly-accessible data servers:
- A THREDDS Data Server, which is available at atmo.math.uwm.edu:8080, has been installed on the new equipment and will serve as a data archive for case study and classroom data.
- A RAMADDA server, accessible at at atmo.math.uwm.edu:8181, makes approximately 4 TB worth of data available to the community at large, including: LDM products; a 14-day running archive of raw WRF-ARW output from Evans' real-time Great Lakes WRF Ensemble; a running archive of NAM and GFS 0-h operational analysis products dating back to December 2011; and multiple reanalysis data sets, including the full NCEP-NCAR and NCEP-DOE-II Reanalyses and NARR data between 2010-2012.
The data sharing capabilities now available at the University of Wisconsin provide system redundancy and benefit any schools that currently do not have access to the LDM/IDD feed (e.g., like UWM previously). Further, the core mission of IW is student education and training through interactions with community clients in a professional setting. Thus, the LDM/IDD feed and data-sharing features of RAMADDA will extend the capabilities of this community outreach program.
