The Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences maintains an extensive archive of meteorological data, including textual information (severe weather statements and other National Weather Service products), numerical model output in gempak format, gif images of weather maps created daily since 2006, and gempak-format surface and upper air data going back to 1933, much of which was provided to us by NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory. For the past year or two, we have made NMQ estimates of precipitation available on the archive as well.
Historically, the archive data has been made available to community members via a file-based web site at http://mtarchive.geol.iastate.edu. We had been told in recent years by users across the country and by Unidata staff that this archive is frequently used.
We received a Unidata 2010 community equipment award to establish a THREDDS and RAMADDA-equipped server to allow community access to this archive information. The award allowed us to purchase a Dell Intel Xeon 5520 server with 32GB of memory and 7 TB of SATA storage. The establishment of the THREDDS server (available at http://mtarchive.geol.iastate.edu/thredds/catalog/catalog.html) makes it much easier for newer Unidata software such as the IDV to access and display the archived data.
We believe the educational and research benefits of the project will be large. The web-based archive was helpful in the last few years at Iowa State in the design of weather lab exercises used in synpotic and mesoscale courses, and the improved access should assist instructors around the world. In addition, the easy access to the archived data should facilitate its use in research projects and in consulting work, as it has at Iowa State while existing in its web-based form. We are continuing to work to make the full archive available via RAMADDA, with the goal of allowing users around the world to supplement the data available, perhaps with photographs or news items. In addition, we hope to add some descriptive details ourselves to act as a catalog and facilitate use by other instructors around the world.
For more information on the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, see the Equipment Awards page.
