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During the weekend of April 10-12 2015, the University of South Florida (USF) was host to a Unidata Regional Workshop on the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the open source Repository for Archiving, Managing, and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS II). The workshop was organized by Dr. Jennifer Collins, with assistance from her students Randall Hergert, Heather Key and Leilani Paxton, in collaboration with Unidata Program Center staff members Tom Yoksas, Yuan Ho, and Michael James. The workshop was sponsored by USF, Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society.
In all, 27 participants attended for one or all three components of the workshop. Affiliations of the participants included those from USF, Florida Gulf Coast University, Hillsborough Community College, FIT, the National Weather Service, Sarasota Channel 7 News, Cyber Geography Research Institute International, and the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association. Backgrounds ranged from university students (including a group of international students from Oman), college professors, private research, and the local media.
Demonstrations of AWIPS II, IDV, and RAMADDA focused on meteorological datasets and ways of visualizing and analyzing the data in 2- and 3-D views. One image included a 3D visualization of a jet-streak over North America, which looked more like a giant worm hovering over the country. The animation of this product gave it an almost life-like quality and demonstrated the ever changing nature of the atmosphere.
Workshop participants were particularly interested in hurricane track data. One particular example focused on the comparison of the forecast models for Hurricane Cristobal (2014) with the actual observed track. Other visualizations of hurricane data included air parcel trajectories, which showed the three-dimensional movement of individual air parcels throughout the structure and core of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Those attending brought in a range of possible uses for the IDV software including: teaching in a college course, research for use in thesis, data presentation, and data sharing. Regional workshops such as this give a good opportunity not only for new users to be exposed to these products from Unidata, but also for feedback to be obtained by Unidata Program developers.
If you are interested in hosting a Unidata regional workshop at your institution, contact support@unidata.ucar.edu.
