The UPC received twenty-four equipment award proposals totaling approximately $465K with overhead. We were quite surprised at the large number of proposals that were submitted this year. The six equipment awards panelists met the afternoon of April 12th and the morning of April 13th and made recommendations for this year's awards. To stay within the 100K budget, the panel recommended funding for seven of the twenty-four proposals. Of the seven proposals recommended for funding, only two were accepted at the full budget amount. The panel recommended funding others anywhere from 43% - 86% of their original request. In all cases the panel was able to identify what could be dropped from the request so that it should be clear to the awardees what portion of their request is being funded.
Award letters were sent out from the UPC in mid-May, and all of the contracts were in place by mid-June.
This year (2005) we had a surprising number of really excellent proposals. Many of the panelists commented that a high percentage of the proposals were fundable if resources weren't so limited. In the next several months we hope to work with the Policy and Users Committee to focus the next RFP so that the denial rate isn't so high.
The awardees for FY2005 were:
| Institution | Proposal | Funded Cost not Including OH |
| Iowa State University | Increasing GIS Web Services Capacity to Serve the Unidata Community | $12,000 |
| Louisiana State University | IDD Community Infrastructure Enhancement at LSU | $15,200 |
| Pennsylvania State University | Transition of Unidata IDD Relay Service to a 64-Bit Architecture | $7,000 |
| University of Hawaii at Manoa | VisionLab 2005 | $11,700 |
| University of Missouri-Kansas City | Enhancing Meteorological Education and Climate Research, and K-12 Educational Outreach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City | $19,000 |
| Purdue University | Equipment to Enhance the Capacity to Process and Disseminate Value-added Weather Data at Purdue University | $7,000 |
| Western Illinois University | New Establishment of Unidata Site for Meteorological Education | $4,000 |
Total |
$75,900 |
|
Including overhead, the total expenditure in FY05 for equipment
awards will be ~$100K.