The IDV Steering Committee continues to be active in its role of guiding, suggesting, testing, etc., for the IDV.

Our last telecon "meeting" was on 13 Nov 2007. Attending were:

Tom Whittaker
Marty Baxter
Dave Dempsey
Mark Laufersweiler
Mark Seefeldt
Rich Signell
Bill Fingerhut
Don Murray
Jeff McWhirter
Yuan Ho

New members, Marty and Dave were introduced. Using WebEx (thanks to Rich Signell) the Unidata developers then presented a demo of new features in IDV 2.4b3. Highlights included grid diagonostics (including GEMPAK functions and GEMPAK file reader), the Jython shell and associated routines, moving layers between views, new skinning and other User Interface items.

We then did our customary "round table discussion". Highlights were:

• saving "interesting cases" on the fly, which prompted Jeff to reply
  with a "I'm glad you asked" introduction to saving data along with
  bundles using the ZIDV files
• ways of connecting IDV with Matlab and IDL -- like to using Matlab as
  a "subroutine"
• "visual flow network" style of fiddling with complex bundles
• issues with staggered grids
• problems with South Pole grids
• Kudos on the Regional Workshop in OK -- very well received
• Announcement of the next workshop on May 18th in Plymouth
• Issues with Mac Leopard
• Display on isentropic surfaces
• how about a readout of data values when you "roam" the mouse -- like
  AWIPS (only better)
• More "english" in the error messages instead of stack traces (please
  let Jeff know specific ones)
• Don asked that everyone PLEASE VERIFY THE FORMULAS!!
• Front chooser only gives one time
• Screen casts that Jeff did were discussed--everyone thought more of these was a good idea.
  
  
  Don also made the following "pitch"....
  
  As well as discussing the recent improvements/new features, we are
  going to discuss future priorities as well. Since we are not ones to
  sit on our hands, we are already working on the following options:
• more grid diagnostics
• I've already added some (e.g, FRNT - sorry no beer for you), but what's missing
• reading GEMPAK grid files (and possibly McIDAS grid files)
• should have GRIB1 and float packing done by Thanksgiving
• data subsetting and saving to local file
• nightly build works for local and remote files, converting to CF conventions
• text point data reading improvements
• new wizard for configuration in nightly build
• what formats should we support?
• saving derived quantities to a netCDF CF file
• not yet starte
• end user GUI configuration
• in nightly build
• image display performance (memory)
• on going talks with SSEC
  
  What's on your list? ;-) Please consider these and your other
  priorities and provide input for the next 3-6 month tasks.
  
  -------------------------
  
  As a footnote -- many of the items discussed have already been resolved. IDV 2.4 was released, and the developers are hard at work on 2.5....
  
  
  --
  Tom Whittaker
  University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Space Science & Engineering Center (SSEC)
  Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS)
  1225 W. Dayton Street
  Madison, WI 53706 USA
  ph: +1 608 262 2759