McIDAS Status

McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, Unidata-Wisconsin, Collaborations, and Cooperating Community Server Activities
Fall 2003

Tom Yoksas
September 25, 2003

Vision

Efforts referenced within this report is based on five of the six endeavors articulated in the Unidata 2008 Proposal:

Endeavor 1: Responding to a broader and more diverse community
Endeavor 2: Comprehensive Support Services
Endeavor 4: Software to analyze and visualize geoscience data
Endeavor 5: Distributed, organized collections of digital material
Endeavor 6: Improved data access infrastructure

Unidata McIDAS-X, -XCD

Version 2003 released on August 6. As of September 23, 2003 38 sites have downloaded Unidata McIDAS 2003. For comparison, 105 sites have downloaded version 2002.
full support of Zlib compressed NOAAPORT GINI imagery added to v2003 release but addendum has not yet been released
incorporate latest SSEC development for support of decoded model data in files with non-standard names)
ADDE server for grid and point source data in GEMPAK format(s) is still a priority. This work will allow COMET case studies to be directly usable by ADDE enabled applications (McIDAS and IDV).
porting of McIDAS-X to MacOS-X was worked on actively for a short period of time. Investigations revealed problems with the OS-X loader, and an incompatibility with the version of X running on the test machine. Further development has been taken over by SSEC.
early states of ADDE server for NEXRAD Level II data (individual elevations, not volume)
continuing support/bug fixes for Unidata and SSEC McIDAS-X, -XCD

ldm-mcidas and Unidata-Wisconsin datastream

current release is v2003 (release announced on August 6).
announced desire to increase the temporal frequency and number of wavelength channels (bands) of the GOES-East and GOES-West products sent in the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream while also increasing the spatial coverage of the GOES-East products to cover South America (when the satellite is providing those scans). User feedback was sparse (less that 10 sites replied to a call for comment), but what was received was in favor of the changes. Given the lack of opposition, we plan to move ahead with the datastream changes in the beginning of October.

Collaborations

Collaboration activities remain mostly unchanged since the last report. Details can be found in May 1 Policy Committee Report.

The most active collaboration, even though it is being conducted in spare time, is the MeteoForum initiative that is funded by UCAR Director's Opportunity Fund (Jack Fellows):

MeteoForum - Unidata/COMET

continued working with MeteoForum WMO RMTC representatives to explore use of LDM to feed conventional, model, and satellite datasets. Most recently, met with representatives from Venezuela to discuss their goals for modernizing meteorological services.
Realtime feeds operational to the Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Success of data delivery is based on LDM-6 advances coupled with the international networking initiative AMPATH (Florida International University, Global Crossing, and Internet-2).
Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) is now acting as the top level IDD distribution node for Brazil and Argentina. UFPA and other Brazilian universities will feed directly from UFRJ after they have been upgraded to a current version of the LDM-6. The resulting data distribution network is known as IDD-Brazil.
provided a MeteoForum/IDD-Brazil white paper to the Unidata NSF/ATM Program Manager, Cliff Jacobs. The information from this status update is the basis for a presentation at the January AMS Annual Meeting to be held in Seattle, WA.

User Support

continuing support of over 150 sites
growing participation by foreign universities (McIDAS-X, LDM) (Argentina, Brazil, China (Hong Kong), Costa Rica, France, Portugal, United Kingdom, Jamaica, Mexico, Spain, Russia (Institute of Atmospheric Optics in Siberia), Thailand)
statistics for UPC support email can be found in a separate report