IDV Steering Committee Report
September 15th, 2006

Since the last report, the Steering Committee members have been modestly active in testing new releases, reporting problems, asking questions, and making suggestions.  These activities culminated with a 2 hour video/telecon in mid-September which provided an opportunity for the developers to introduce new capabilities in version 2.1beta, to discuss with John Caron issues related to data formats and access, and finally to begin creating a prioritized list of tasks for the next release.  I am pleased to report 100% participation, and thanks to Rich Signell for hosting the video with WebEx once again. There were many kudos and positive comments given to the developers during their demo for a job really well done.

Here are the highlights of the discussion issues:

* get the forum running, including an RSS feed.  "IDV is at a mature stage and we need to get knowledge out to users and potential users."

* consider image subsetting (akin to the grid subsetting just implemented) and perhaps easier interfaces to load images based on the display geometry and not the image geometry.

* preserving data used in a bundle.  The issues are complex, and go beyond simply moving datasets to a local harddrive.

* more interest in scripting -- more experience needed with current capability, however.

* consider an "IDV lite" for beginners that has a considerably stripped-down User Interface

* more NWS products like hurricane positions, watches, etc.  It was pointed out that thanks to the popularity of Google Earth, many places (like WDTB, for example) are producting "data" in KML that can now be displayed using the IDV.

* staggered grids -- a variety of issues, not the least of which is the CF Committee has not decided what to do....

* continue implementation of diagnostic operators (functions)

* many performance issues have been addressed with point and grid data, and the one remaining (images) needs to have some work done.

In addition, other tasks were identified and over the next few weeks we will be creating and prioritizing a list for the developers.

Current members of the IDV Steering Comm:

Mark Laufersweiler
Mike Voss
Bill Fingerhut
Mark Seefeldt
Rich Signell
Steve Aulenbach
Tom Whittaker (chair)