Video display wall at the NOAA/CDC Lab in Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) maintains a repository of climate datasets that is used daily by researchers and educators at CIRES and around the world. These datasets are being used to answer questions about the Earth's climate system, such as the cause and nature of extreme climate events like the 2010 Russian Heat Wave. We received funds from the 2011 Unidata Community Equipment Awards program to purchase a new server to enhance and expand our existing THREDDS Data Server (TDS) capabilities and establish a RAMADDA server at the CDC in order to provide end-to-end data services that facilitate research and education in the climate sciences.

Student using the THREDDS server to acquire Landsat imagery.

New Mexico State University's community data portal uses Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) Data Server and Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA) server applications. The portal makes data sets that have been archived at NMSU's Center for Applied Remote Sensing in Agriculture, Meteorology and Environment (CARSAME) and New Mexico Climate Center available to the public.

Unidata's LDM, THREDDS, RAMADDA, and other technologies play integral roles in Pennsylvania State University's provision of meteorological data to their own students and researchers and to the wider university community. A 2011 Community Equipment Award helped Penn State upgrade some of their servers to be more capable and reliable.

RAMADDA version 1.3 is now available. The new version has a number of new features, including:

• Google Earth plugin integration and improved maps
• NLAS/RAMADDA LiDAR data services
• Lots of bug fixes and documentation
• New and improved Wiki facilites
• Page styles
• A number of new plugins

Senior undergraduate Matt Corbi prepares a convective outlook using NMAP2

In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM.  The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.