Call
for Participation-December 5, 2003 - This activity is the final
step toward provision of "freely available" Level II WSR-88D data distribution
to the academic community, which will also serve private industry, government,
etc. The process began in November 1997 in the Unidata conference room
when several representatives from various organizations met and agreed
that a collaboration among the representatives was justified to explore
the access and distribution of Level II data, using Unidata's LDM technology.
The concept was taken to the Policy Committee and Users Committee where
concurrence was gained.which gained. The project became known as the
Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test
(CRAFT)
project, which successfully demonstrated and tested Level II data
distribution using LDM with Internet2-Abilene. Initially, testing began
with six radars and grew to the current 102 radars, providing Level
II data to interested academic and other stakeholders through the CRAFT
project at the University of Oklahoma-CAPS program. The NWS monitored
the progress of CRAFT, initiated membership of NOAA to Internet2, and
adopted LDM software for use in providing Level II data to NWS, NCEP,
NCDC and with Unidata's assistance, through the call for participation
from .edu sites, to all academic sites "free of charge." An MOA is being
crafted by the Department of Commerce/NOAA lawyers for each academic
site who will provide Top Level data distribution services to academia
and not-for-profit cost recovery when distributing data (non-value added)
to private sector customers. The NWS will have the data distributed
to them in the same manner, and they are hoping to have agreement with
the sites by March 2004. This project has highlighted Unidata and the
LDM technology which has been the foundation for accessing, distributing
and managing data for the Internet Data Distribution, and has served
many other partners since 1995. This service will offer data for research
and education to all academic instiutions. Unidata hopes that it will
help to faciliate use of the
Integrated
Data Viewer. (IDV)
