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[Datastream #VWR-727428]: Data Query

Hi Dale,

re:
> I am currently working for the data and information management component of
> the Africa Adaptation Programme. We are setting up 20 African countries with
> high performance computing servers (HPC) and providing training on using
> RAMADDA for application in country.

Very cool!

Can I ask what the 20 countries are?

The reason I ask is that Unidata is involved in the UCAR Africa Initiative where
we (UCAR/NCAR) will be transferring various technologies to ACMAD (in Niamey, 
Niger)
in support of managing meningitis in the Sahel.  The Unidata technologies that
will be part of this technology transfer/sharing are our:

- LDM - Local Data Manager
- IDV - Integrated Data Viewer
- RAMADDA

re:
> The idea being giving these countries
> access to the best available data and information so that they can run their
> own climate analysis and make informed decisions.

Excellent!

re:
> I would like to know what
> kind of coverage and resolution you have in your data harvesters for Africa?
> Radar, satellite etc and at what temporal resolution?

Unfortunately, we have no radar and very little satellite data available
for Africa.  Radar data access is very difficult in Africa given the
tight controls that African countries maintain over nationally-generated
data.

Geostationary satellite coverage is provided by EUMETSAT which tightly
controls redistribution of the data in real-time (data must be 24 hours
old before it can be freely shared).  To their credit, however, the
EUMETSAT member countries have funded the installation of EUMETCAST
reception systems in (I believe) each country in Africa.  The EUMETCAST
broadcast includes all real-time data from METEOSAT 9 in a wavelet-compressed
format.  That data could be made available by remote access technologies
like RAMADDA and McIDAS ADDE if the server software ran on the the EUMETCAST
receiving station or was transferred to a machine/cluster where those
servers were installed and running.  Right now, Unidata collaborators at
the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) of the University of
Wisconsin at Madison (UW) are working on code that will make the wavelet
compressed satellite data directly usable in McIDAS-V (which is based
on the Unidata IDV).  We will be folding that work back into the IDV
after all of the kinks have been worked out by SSEC developers.

We do have other data that should be most useful to countries participating
in the AAP:  global forecast system (GFS) model output from NCEP (currently
1 degree (111.1 km) and 0.5 degree (55.5 km)) and global surface and upper
air data from the Global Telecommunications System (GTS).  These data
are flowing in near real-time to sites that are participating in our
Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system (which is powered by our LDM
software) free-of-charge (like all of the data whose access we facilitate).

We are very interested in continuing this dialog with you/the UNDP Africa
Adaptation Programme.

re:
> Much appreciated,

No worries.  I look forward to exploring possibilities with you further in
the near future!

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: VWR-727428
Department: Support Datastream
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed