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

Tom Yoksas
May 14, 2004

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 May 10, 2004 103 unique sites (out of 288 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, addenda #2 released February 20, addenda #3 released March 20, addenda #4 released April 16
incorporated latest SSEC development for support of decoded model data in files with non-standard names
Unidata Addendum contained code mods that enable users to use MacOS-X/Panther
continuing support/bug fixes for Unidata and SSEC McIDAS-X, -XCD
SSEC contacted us about sites downloading Unidata McIDAS who were not allowed as per Unidata/SSEC agreements. The hole in the Unidata web portal user registration that allowed access to Unidata McIDAS by non-educational institutions was found and plugged in April.

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 increased to include South America (when the satellite is providing those scans) at the end of January/beginning of February
NOAAPORT: developed 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).
installed 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.
installed Unidata NOAAPORT ingest system at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose, CR at end of February. Now, and for the first time the UCR is able to ingest, decode, and use real time global observational data and NCEP and UKMET model output for education and research.

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
on-site LDM training has been provided to NWS regional headquarters personnel (Emmerson)

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 and institutions (McIDAS-X or LDM): Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, China (Hong Kong), Costa Rica, France, Portugal, United Kingdom, Jamaica, Mexico, Spain, Vietnam (National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting), Russia (Institute of Atmospheric Optics in Siberia), Thailand
statistics for UPC support email can be found in a separate report