International Activities and Collaborators

Status Report: May - September 2011

Tom Yoksas

Strategic Focus Areas

The Group Name group's work supports the following Unidata funding proposal focus areas:

  1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
    By informing the international atmospheric science community of the products, data and services available in the Unidata Program, an extended community has been enabled.
  2. Developing and deploying useful tools
    The majority of tools downloadable from Unidata are available free-of-charge to everyone (the exception being McIDAS-X).
  3. Enhancing user support services
    Activities of the Unidata Program Center are routinely provided to the worldwide atmospheric science community. Strategic partnerships with leading organizations in other countries minimize the impact on UPC staff.
  4. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities
    Non-U.S. users of products available from Unidata reflect, in a number of cases, minority constituencies in the U.S. atmospheric science community.

International Activities Since the Last Status Report

Several international outreach activities were conducted the last User Committee meeting in Spring, 2011

  • A hands-on training session that focused on the IDV, RAMADDA, and THREDDS was held at the NCAR/UCAR/The Cyprus Institute-organized WRF in the Middle East training workshop on May 2-8. Students from a variety of countries from northern Africa, the Middle East, and as far away as Pakistan were led through exercises that showed how tools that are freely-available from the UPC can be usefully employed in analysis of WRF model output.
  • Unidata presented and participated in the NCAR Africa Colloquium on July 25 - August 5. Use of the IDV and RAMADDA in analysis of multispectral satellite imagery from METEOSAT Second Generation (MSG) was demonstrated to the 23 graduate students from the United States, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana, and Nepal.
  • Unidata staff and former staff participated in the NSF Workshop on Science and Cyberinfrastructure in Africa August 5-6. Workshop organizers from the Network Resource Center http://www.nsrc.org expressed interest in Unidata presenting hands-on training sessions for the IDV and RAMADDA in association with networking workshops that they conduct worldwide.
  • Unidata staff presented and participated in the Faculty Satellite Data and Products into Geosciences Residence Course (SGEO2011) in Boulder on August 8-12. Use of the IDV and RAMADDA in the analysis and display of real-time data was demonstrated course participants.
  • Data from UCAR GOES East/West/South ingest systems have been routinely accessed by international users in North, Central and South America using McIDAS-X, IDV, and McIDAS-V.
  • Use of Unidata tools, especially netCDF and the IDV, continues to grow internationally.
  • IDD-Brazil continues to expand in Africa.