International Activities and Collaborations
Summer/Fall 2009

Executive Overview

UPC International outreach activities remain largely unchanged since the last Policy Committee meeting in Spring 2009.

• A variety of groups in UCAR, including Unidata, actively sought and were awarded funding from Google.org for support of the development of a prototype Earth Gauging System in Africa. The initial activity in this effort is aimed at forecasting in support of meningitis epidemic management in northern Ghana. Unidata's role is centered on application of Unidata technologies in support of research efforts and data accumulation and dissemination. Unidata software packages that are/will be prominently featured in this effort are the LDM, IDV, RAMADDA, THREDDS, and the ADDE component of McIDAS-X.
• Unidata will host an Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) session at the AGU 2010 Joint Assembly that will be held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil in August, 2010. Tom Yoksas is the ESSI Program Committee representative for this meeting.
• The Unidata-hosted Latin American Data Workshop that was held on the Universidade de São Paulo campus in São Paulo, Brazil on August 21-23, 2008 is believed to be one of the primary driving factors in the active use of the Unidata/EOL/RAL GOES-10 ingest facility in UCAR. Please refer to the McIDAS Status Report for more details on the GOES-10 ingest facility use.
• Use of Unidata tools, especially netCDF and the IDV, continues to grow internationally
• IDD-Brazil continues to grow and has expanded into Africa
• Data from UCAR GOES East/West/South ingest systems are routinely accessed by international users in North, Central and South America using McIDAS-X, IDV, and McIDAS-V

by Tom Yoksas