McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, GOES Ingest and NOAAPort Status Report
Summer/Fall 2009

Overview

The use of McIDAS in the U.S. educational community remains largely unchanged since the last Policy Committee meeting in Spring 2009.

• Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009 was made available on July 10, 2009. The UPC continues to make bugfix and enhancement upgrades available through an addendum process. Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009 was an addendum upgrade to v2008.

• The UPC continues to receive sporadic requests for McIDAS from international university users and U.S. government agencies and other non-traditional Unidata users (e.g., private businesses, etc.). Government agencies and non-traditional Unidata users are referred to UW/SSEC for access to McIDAS; international educational community user requests are granted on a case-by-case basis after they provide a clear statement of their acceptance of the terms of use provided by SSEC.

• The UPC (Yoksas) actively participates in the McIDAS Advisory Committee (MAC). The MAC was assembled by UW/SSEC to advise SSEC on McIDAS-X users needs/concerns/desires for development in the next generation McIDAS, McIDAS-V.
• ldm-mcidas v2008 included support for USPLN lightning data and is available as source code and as binary releases for select platforms.

• Unidata-ingested GOES-10 imager data was integrated in Unidata-Wisconsin GOES-East composite image sectors beginning January 31, 2007.

  Direct, programmatic access to real-time GOES-10 data via McIDAS ADDE spurred use by over 450 users in 33 countries who downloaded an average of 615 GB of data per month. Notably, over 1 TB of data was downloaded per month during the 2008/9 South American tropical wet season by a wide variety of users including NCAR/EOL for support of the Variability of American Monsoon Systems Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study Regional Experiment.

  NB: GOES-10 is currently scheduled for decommissioning on December 1, 2009. Unidata has drafted a letter urging NOAA/NESDIS to consider repurposing one of the existing operational GOES platforms (e.g., GOES-12) for South American surveillance as soon as feasible after GOES-10's decommissioning.

• Unidata NOAAPort ingest package continues to provide NOAAPort content in the IDD's HDS, IDS|DDPLUS, NGRID, NIMAGE, and NEXRAD3 feeds. The package is know to be used by 16 sites, but the number is undoubtedly higher since SSEC makes the package available to its McIDAS-XCD users.

by Tom Yoksas.