International Activities and Collaborations
Fall, 2007

Tom Yoksas
October 12, 2007

Executive Overview

• Unidata hosted an Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) session at the AGU Spring 2007 Joint Assembly held in Acapulco, Mexico on 22-25 May
• Unidata was an active participant in the UCAR-AAAS Sahel Conference 2007 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
• Use of Unidata tools continues to grow internationally
• Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology resumes active status in community
• IDD-Brazil continues to be strong and expands into Africa
• Unidata/SSEC provides GOES-East imagery for Central American RAMSDIS sites

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Vision

Efforts referenced within this report are 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

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Background

International extension of Unidata packages and services began in earnest with the UOP Director-funded, joint Unidata/COMET MeteoForum pilot project. Unidata products (especially the netCDF) and services were used internationally before MeteoForum, but there was no concerted effort expended to advertise/promote our offerings.

The MeteoForum vision was originally articulated in the 2001 Fulker/Spangler proposal submitted in application for UCAR Director's Opportunity Funding (Jack Fellows):

MeteoForum - An International Network of Meteorological Training Centers for the 21st Century

"The MeteoForum pilot project will include a small group of educational institutions (some universities and some WMO RMTCs) that are motivated to enhance the contributions of modern meteorology in their regions. Participants will be expected to have relatively fast Internet access, appropriate computers, and suitable personnel. Some of these personnel will be trained to run MeteoForum software on their computers so as to to access real-time data, training materials, and other resources. Where practical, participants in the MeteoForum pilot also will contribute real-time data and educational resources to the effort. By integrating these elements, the pilot project will serve as a model on which to build a full-scale international MeteoForum. Initially, the MeteoForum pilot project will build upon capabilities now offered in the U.S. by the government-sponsored COMET and Unidata programs"

NB: MeteoForum funding has long been exhausted.

The continuing international activities at the UPC are best characterized as a natural extension of our outreach activities to the higher education research and education communities.

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Recent International Activities of Note

• As a follow-on to the AGU 2006 Spring Joint Assembly (JA06) Cyberinfrastructure session held in Baltimore, MD, an Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) session was organized jointly by Tom Yoksas (UPC), Elen Cutrim (Western Michigan), Glenn Rutledge (NOAA/NOMADS), Waldenio Gambi (INPE/CPTEC, Brazil), and Luis Farfan (CICESE, Mexico) for the AGU 2007 Spring Joint Assembly (JA07) that was held in Acapulco, Mexico on 22-25 May. The ESSI session was the same as the one held in Baltimore in 2006:

  Earth and space science Cyberinfrastructures: Data, Tools, Distribution and Forecast Systems for International Collaboration

  Overview:

  To help build a stronger and broader space and Earth Science cyberinfrastructure community through international collaboration. We encouraged submission of papers on biogeophysical, meteorological, ecological, remote sensing, and related intelligent and adaptive systems for data collection, processing, and knowledge discovery and classroom dissemination. Special attention was given to presentations on data, tools, and forecast systems that foster collaborations among the research and education communities in the Western Hemisphere.

  This spring's session was the most popular of all ESSI sessions accounting for 68% of all ESSI abstracts submitted.

• Unidata is playing an active role in the joint UCAR - AAAS Africa Initiative that was inaugurated in Summer, 2006. As part of this initiative, a workshop was convened in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso on April 2-6, 2007. Details of the the conference can be found in:

  Sahel Conference 2007: Improving Lives by Understanding Weather (http://www.africa.ucar.edu/sahelconference.html)

  The conference website is updated as activities evolve.

• growing participation by international universities (GEMPAK, IDV, LDM, McIDAS-X, netCDF, etc.):

  Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, China, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, Venezuela.

  As the UCAR-AAAS Africa initiative evolves, it is expected that interest in Unidata product offerings will continue to grow in Africa.

• the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH) in Husbands, St. James Barbados has resumed participation in the IDD after a hiatus caused by an interruption in their Internet service. The reestablishment of a significantly improved Internet connection allows for greater participation in the IDD and use of Unidata tools that take advantage of data hosted on remote servers (e.g., IDV and McIDAS). Increased Internet connectivity has been done hand-in-hand with increased computing capabilities in the center -- the new Principle, Dr. David Farrell, has been moving computing infrastructure to SuSE Linux. Objectives of the move are to provide a modern laboratory that can be used by UWI students to take courses at the CIMH, and to be able to run local/regional models (e.g., WRF).

  Discussions with Gerry Creager of Texas A&M aimed at provision of high resolution WRF model output over Barbados (and Central America) are evolving. The goal is to be able to provide the environment in which the CIMH can initialize and run local area models.

• the IDD-Brazil, inaugurated in December, 2003, continues to expand in South America AND has recently been extended into Africa. At least 26 IDD nodes at 12 institutions are participating in the IDD-Brasil and reporting statistics back to the UPC.

  Some Brazilian participants:

  • INPE/CPTEC - top level relay and data injection node (INPE is the Brazilian equivalent of NASA; CPTEC runs models operationally for Brazil in a role that is similar to NCEP's role in the US)
  • Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) - top level relay and data injection node
  • Universidade de São Paulo - leaf node (will evolve into a data injection node)
  • Universidade de Santa Catarina - leaf node
  • Universidade Federal do Parã (UFPA) - leaf node (RMTC) (in progress to return to active status)
  • Pontifica Universidade Catolica de Minas Gerais - leaf node
  • Laboratorio Nacional de Computaçao Cientifica (LNCC) - leaf node
  • CEFET-RJ - Technical school of Meteorology in Rio de Janeiro - leaf node
  • INMET - Brazilian National Weather Service - leaf node
  • Universidade de Pucminas - leaf node

  Non-Brazilian participants:

  • Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) - leaf node (RMTC)
  • Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal) - leaf node
  • Colombian Air Force (Colombia) - leaf node
  • Cabo Verde (Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa) - leaf node

  Many of these institutions began participating as a result of the Unidata/CPTEC/UFRJ presence at the XIII Congresso Brasileiro de Meteorologia (CBMET, the 13th Brazilian Meteorological Congress) in September 2004. Presentations by active IDD-Brazil participants at the 2006 CBMET in Florianopolis, Brazil has continue to increase interest in Latin America.

  Since joining the IDD/IDD-Brazil in summer, 2005, the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) has been actively using real-time data visualized by GEMPAK in the classroom and for research.

• The Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) is actively involved in connecting to Internet2. I2 access will allow high resolution model data to be delivered and used for local and regional modeling efforts (e.g., WRF). The UCR will also then be in a position to assume a leading role in the distribution of realtime weather data throughout Central America. Establishment of this capability will be the cornerstone for he envisioned IDD-Caribe.

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Additional International Activity Information

Further information on Unidata international activities can be found in the separate International Activities White Paper.

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Previous MeteoForum Information

Background material on MeteoForum can be found in previous User and Policy Committee Meeting reports:

October 2005 User Committee Meeting MeteoForum - Yoksas.

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Collaborations

Collaboration activities remain largely unchanged since the May 2, 2007 User's Committee Report.

Collaborations that are most active include:

• Unidata agreed to act as a primary backup for GOES-East imagery for RAMSDIS installations in Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama. This arrangement came about because of GOES-East ingest problems at the National Weather Service in Costa Rica (the site where all of the Central American RAMSDIS installations get GOES-East imagery), and because a desire to establish better relationships with WMO's Virtual Laboratory effort.

  GOES-East imagery will be provided via ADDE transfers from the Unidata toplevel IDD relay node installed in the SSEC Data Center, unidata2.ssec.wisc.edu.

• Unidata continues to be actively involved in the UCAR-wide Africa Initiative. Recent activities included participation (5 presentations and 3 afternoons of hands-on sessions for COMET modules, use of the IDV, in the Sahel Conference 2007 in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso on April 2-6, 2007.

• Collaborations with EUMETSAT aimed at promoting use of remote access methodologies (ADDE and THREDDS), first in Darmstadt and then in member states, have resulted in free ADDE access to real-time METEOSAT-8 data (after users register with EUMETSAT) for research and training. EUMETSAT personnel (Marianne Koenig) reported on the status of this effort at the Spring 2006 AGU Joint Assembly held Baltimore, MD in May.

• INPE/CPTEC is ingesting GOES-10 data at their installation in Cachoeira Paulista, SP, Brazil. NOAA offered CPTEC the full suite of processing software used for GOES-East/West imagery. Since that GOES processing software is McIDAS-based, CPTEC is investigating the possibility of inviting Unidata and SSEC/CIMSS staff to visit Cachoeira Paulista and hold a focused McIDAS training workshop. The latest target date for the workshop is early October, 2007.

• INPE/CPTEC is converting satellite imagery captured by its TeraScan (tm) system to McIDAS AREA format. Recent UPC evaluations of the images being produced by CPTEC shows a systematic navigation error in each band. CPTEC is aware of the problem and is working to correct it. The UPC received the the CPTEC code and it passed it on to SSEC/CIMSS and SSEC/AMRC community members for evaluation.

• MeteoForum. This collaboration resulted in the creation in the active South American extension of the IDD, the IDD-Brazil. This effort captured and still holds the interest in the highest levels in Brazilian meteorological circles. More information on the IDD-Brazil can be found in the International status report.

by Tom Yoksas