McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, Unidata-Wisconsin, Collaborations, and Cooperating Community Server Activities
Winter 2004

Tom Yoksas
January 27, 2003

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

Unidata McIDAS-X, -XCD

• Version 2003 released on August 6. As of January 22, 2004 77 unique sites (out of 164 access records on the Unidata web portal) have downloaded Unidata McIDAS 2003. For comparison, 105 sites have downloaded version 2002.

• -X and -XCD addendum #1 was released November 4

• full support of Zlib compressed NOAAPORT GINI imagery added to v2003 release

• incorporate latest SSEC development for support of decoded model data in files with non-standard names

• initial work for porting McIDAS-X to MacOS-X was continued by SSEC. With Panther release of MacOS-X, McIDAS is able to be built and appears fully functional. Unidata Addendum #2 will contain code mods that enable users to use MacOS-X/Panther

• continuing support/bug fixes for Unidata and SSEC McIDAS-X, -XCD

• conducted training workshop in October/November 2003. Attended by 11 participants from as far away as Brazil (INPE/CPTEC) and The Netherlands.

ldm-mcidas, Unidata-Wisconsin datastream, and NOAAPORT ingest

• ldm-mcidas: current release, v2003, announced on August 6

• Unidata-Wisconsin: increased broadcast frequency and number of wavelength channels (bands) for GOES-East and GOES-West IDD products. We are now sending all imager channels in the IDD UNIWISC stream. The datastream change was postponed from September to the beginning of January because of site requests to not make the modifications during the school year.

• spatial coverage of the GOES-East products will increase to include South America (when the satellite is providing those scans) at the end of January/beginning of February

• NOAAPORT: development of NOAAPORT ingest system based on DVB-S technology that the NWS is moving towards. Side-by-side ingest comparisons of an existing Unidata NOAAPORT system with the new DVB-S system showed that the new system operates with no loss of data. We intend to create a web page describing our DVB-S development so that universities can build their own NOAAPORT ingest systems if they so choose (Yoksas, Chiswell, Schmidt, Smith).

• installated a Unidata NOAAPORT ingest system at the Southern Region Climate Center (SRCC) at Louisiana State University (LSU). This system was put together from software developed at the UPC (Schmidt, Chiswell, Yoksas) and hardware bought cheaply on Ebay (Schmidt). The SSEC-developed NOAAPORT desktop ingest system (SDI) that had been used by the SRCC is being repurposed at the UPC into a GOES ingester. The SRCC SDI will be coupled with an SDI already in the UPC's possession to provide remote ADDE access to full GOES imager and sounder data for the Unidata community. A twin to this system has been in operation at the SSEC for over a year, but announcement of its existence has been delayed until this needed redundancy is in place.

Collaborations

Collaboration activities remain mostly unchanged since the May 2003 report. Details can be found in May 1 Policy Committee Report.

NWS NEXRAD Level II Data Relay

• performed stress tests of LDM-6 to demonstrate capability of relaying Level II data with negligible latencies

• participated in NWS Level II data distribution design planning

• slated to provide on-site LDM training to NWS regional headquarters personnel in Spring

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). A MeteoForum status report is include separately.

User Support

• continuing support of over 150 sites

• continuing 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

Cooperating Community Data Servers - Prelude to THREDDS

Status unchanged since May 2003 report. Details can be seen in May 1, 2003 Policy Committee Report.

This page was prepared by Tom Yoksas.