Administrative Matters: Businger

• The draft agenda was adopted
• The suggested date for the Policy Committee is May 2, 2012, place TBD, and the Users Committee will meet April 2, 2012
• Thanks to members who are rotating off of both committees!
  • Brian Colle and Anton Kruger are rotating off the Policy committee
  • Brendon Hoch and Larry Oolman are rotating off the Users committee
• Welcome to new committee members:
  • Dave Dempsey and Bill Gallus are joining the Policy committee
  • Martin Baxter, Jennifer Collins, Gerry Creager, and Bart Geerts are joining the Users committee
• Action Items were reviewed with the following comments:
  • Action 1: Triennial Workshop has been discussed and a sub committee has been formed to include one Policy Committee member.
  • Action 2: The orientation for new members took place on 26 October. It was a success.
  • Action 3: The white paper created by Russ about branding was posted.
• New Action Item - publish article on Web about acknowledging Unidata
• Discussion about the branding issue took place. David Tarboton sent the following Acknowledgement Tag for consideration.

Tom Whittaker provided a summary of the Users Committee action items from the April 11-12 meeting.

• Action: Tom Whittaker and Linda Miller will work together to get the DeSouza community award solicitation sent to the Unidata community during December 2011.
• Rich Signell will chair a THREDDS steering committee. It was suggested that one additional member be added to the committee from the Unidata Policy Committtee.
  Members of the committee are:
  Rich Signell (USGS - Chair, IOOS Modeling Testbed, NSF OOI-CI, Unidata User Committee)
  Dave Neufeld  (U Colorado/NOAA, NcISO)
  John Maurer (U Hawaii, IOOS, PACIOOS Site Development)
  Kevin O'Brien (U. Washington/NOAA, NOAA Unified Access Framework Project)
  David Stuebe (UCSD/ASA, Data Management Architect for NSF OOI-CI)
  Roy Mendelsohn (NOAA/IOOS, CoastWatch THREDDS, ERDDAP, NOAA/DMIT&UAF, OGC CF-netCDF SWG)
  Kyle Wilcox (Applied Science Associates, IOOS Modeling Testbed, MARACOOS)
  Tom Kunicki (USGS, GeoDataPortal, NCPP)
  

Director's Report - Mohan Ramamurthy

Some important points:

• Dr. Thomas Bogdan new President of UCAR
• Unidata on the move - first to Anthes Bldg then back to a newly remodeled FL4
• Coming and going - Sean Arms (previous student to UserComm) joined Unidata; Ed Hartnett left to join the Laboratory of Atmospheric Space Physics at CU
• Average output of data from Unidata's cluster is 5.7 TB, while input has increased due to NEXRAD Dual Pol
• Fire Weather model output from selected areas of NAM added to CONDUIT feed
• Lightning data is provided to universities by Vaisala's National Ligtning Detection Network (NLDN) and WSI's Global Lightning Network (GLN)
• THREDDS has a steering committee - chair, Rich Signell
• RAMADDA is now in SourceForge - Jeff McWhirter, primary developer continues to add capabilities
• IDV development continues - GEMPAK surface and upper air support, Hovmoller diagram capability,
• ensemble model support, new interface for memory allocation, etc
• over 10,000 IDV downloads per year
• GEMPAK and McIDAS-X both support Dual Pol Level III products
• AWIPS II - Unidata continues to collaborate with NCEP, NWS and Raytheon.
  • Raytheon has adapted the LDM for AWIPS II
• Jira use for netCDF and THREDDS to track development
• Unidata submitted four white papers for EarthCube
• Training workshops
• OGC Technical Committee and GEOSS meetings were held in September
• Space Shuttle Program recognition for Tom Yoksas and Steve Emmerson
• Strategic Planning underway at UPC

Unidata Budget Summary-Terry Mitchell (postponed until Policy Committee Meeting 10/28/2011)

NSF - Cliff Jacobs (via conference call)

Cliff provided the NSF presentation for Bernard Grant.

Some important points include:

• Strategic plan for NSF (it is downloadable from Web)
• Check strategic goals, because they are relevant to Unidata
• Set of frameworks
• NSF Director wants more integrated foundation
• Global impact-best practices
• 2012-13 % increase
• May end up being 10% for GEO
• Alaska research vessel 105M
• Ocean obs-148M
• EarthCube-3 leads-CIF21-GeoVision-framework to understand the Earth System from sun to center of the Earth
• Cannot build infrastructure with solicitations
• Community needs to self-organize (via social network somewhat) emerging technologies
• Community guided infrastructure
• Knowledge management across geosiences
• Make knowledge visible, build knowledge infrastructure, develop knowledge culture, build knowledge intensity
• 10 years to integrate knowledge management
• Researchers spend 80% of their time trying to find data and 20% actually doing their research
• See the presentation for EarthCube informaton

Bernard suggested that the UPC not make EarthCube a priority for funding in the future.

AWIPS II Migration - Scott Jacobs

Forecaster Integration Testing (FIT) phase 2 underway now.

A tour of Unidata's temporary quarters and demo in the open area of AWIPS II was provided by Michael James, and a demo of IDV was given by Sean Arms and Yuan Ho.

NOAA/NWS - Leroy Spayd (via conference call)

• Budgets are uncertain, due to possible Omnibus for FY12
• Largest differences in budget are due to Climate Services and JPSS
• AWIPS II - WFO Omaha should be deployed by end of CY11; deployment will go into FY13
• GOES 15 becomes GOES-West in June 2012
• More in Leroy's presentation

NASA - Peter Griffith

Peter discussed the Earth Science Division Focus Areas. Review of the presentation will provide information on the programs. Focus areas are:

• Atmospheric Composition
• Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems
• Climate Variabiity and Change
• Weather
• Water and Energy Cycle
• Earth Surface and Interior

Strategic Planning Session (Cliff Jacobs and Bernard Grant sat in via conference call)

• Review of the draft Vision, Mission Statement & Goals
• Jack Fellows suggested that the Vision Statement should be related to an actionable strategic plan linked to all three areas together with common words. Incorporate an element of time.
• Cliff asked the question of what is the vision, could be along the lines of emerging technologies and disparate data sets for universities. Where will a researcher be in 10 years sitting at his desk? Think of a product and have everything at his fingertips-seamless data access - transparency -  data formats and the tools incorporated.
• Reduce "data friction" and computational data sets are delivered to the user – need to provide a vision for new products and domains
• Need to emphasize analysis and visualization - this is a very important aspect of research and education
• Cloud computing-use of facility capabilities
• Provide a platform to advance the geosciences
• What does the community really want
• Find the emerging technologies to serve those needs
• Intellectual commons for community
  
• Can Unidata provide a framework to provide more than just geosciences/atmospheric science, ie. Social Science
• What do you say about a user experience, commonalities about user experiences (Vision)
  

Open Source - Ethan Davis

Software has always been open source, but has not been easy. Unidata retains control, but welcomes contributions. Soure management and version control is done with git. There are tools for integration and testing. Unidata is currently testing Bamboo.

McIDAS and IDV discussion - Tom Whittakeer

• Read the papers-facilitate working together-McIDAS V is built on top of IDV-
  Wisconsin wanted to make changes to IDV - need to ask if it is beneficial to have one application
• What to disagree on-merging the two apps
  Support issues-McIDAS X-local expert (Tom Y)
  Hydra (Wisconsin created)-Ethan and Tom working on roadmap-they will set up a small advisory committee
  Testing needed-this is not worked out yet
  2 students are testing McIDAS V in Madison
  There are some sticking points that need to be worked out
  Hydra implementation into IDV would be needed to be done by Wisc. 
• To date, $5.2 million has been spent on IDV software development

Linda Miller
Community Services - Unidata
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000
303 497-8646 fax: 303 497-8690

(EarthCube White Papers)