Unidata Program Center, Boulder, Colorado
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Members |
UPC Staff |
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Steven Businger—Chair |
Mohan Ramamurthy |
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Rich Clark |
Ben Domenico |
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Vanda Grubisic |
Ethan Davis (for John Caron) |
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Rudy Husar |
Jo Hansen |
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Jim Koermer |
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Paul Ruscher |
Terry Mitchell |
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Russ Rew |
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Agency Representatives |
Jeff Weber for Monday |
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Jeff de La Beaujardiere, NASA |
Tom Yoksas |
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Bernard Grant, (NSF/ATM) |
The following staff members were present for portions of the meeting: Steve Chiswell, Steve Emmerson, Anne Wilson |
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Committee Representative |
NCAR and UOP Representatives |
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Gary Lackmann (Users Committee Chair) |
Jack Fellows, Director, UOP |
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Hanne Mauriello, UOP Director's Office (Monday morning) |
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Not in Attendance |
Tim Spangler, Director, COMET Program (Monday only) |
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Leroy Spayd, NOAA |
Roger Wakimoto, Director NCAR/EOL |
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Mike Bevis |
Steve Worley, NCAR/CISL/SCD (Monday only) |
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Gene Takle |
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David Tarboton |
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Melanie Wetzel |
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Mohan's presentation began with recognition of the new policy committee members and new Users Committee member, Bill Gallus. He also noted that committee member, Rich Clark, will receive the AMS 2008 Teaching Excellence Award at the AMS Annual Meeting, and Unidata former director, Dave Fulker, will receive the 2008 AMS Cleveland Abbe Award.
Since the last committee meeting in July:
In effect, the state of the Program is quite similar to its position at the July meeting when only two areas were noted as areas of concern, funding and staffing. It's recognized that it's impossible to separate the two.
Budget Report (Mitchell)
With increasing budgetary constraints, we have always kept an eye out for funding above and beyond our NSF core funding. Taking a look at the proposal statistics for the last 10 years shows that Unidata is at about a 54% success rate for funded proposals compared with UOP's overall 77% rate. Both are good compared to the national average of about 30-40%.
Turning to our analysis of FY07, we ended the year on track with our projections. A key point to make is the carryover from FY06, which consisted of $655k in FY07 funding that was received late in FY06. Following that trend, we also received some FY08 funding late in the fiscal year to add to our carryover balance for FY08. So that, in combination with funding on the CADIS and NEXRAD projects, contributed to the considerable FY08 carryover amount.
As expected, we expended more than the $3.431M in new core funding for FY07. Both direct and indirect costs have increased over the current award period, but the percentage breakout by expenditure type has held steady, with salaries, benefits, and overhead being the biggest outlays.
We're hoping that along with carryover, the anticipated 4.5% increase in core funding for FY08 will offset our deficit spending and put us in a favorable position as we head into the new award period starting in FY09. Without any new direct funds in the next two years, however, we will have depleted all of our carryover and reserves by the end of FY09. We will continue to seek out direct funding as much as possible to supplement our core funding and to leverage our resources to maintain a healthy budget both in the short and long-term.
Jeff has created a multi-layered, comprehensive web document that will assist users in locating and understanding data available through the program center. Jeff's document leads off with data types, formats, access protocols, and clients headers. Each of those headers contains links to more images and information. For example, "Data Type", when selected, expands to a diagram that illustrates the current display capabilities and maps out the process of how to use that type of data with Unidata tools. In addition, every object provides information about the data or format, and can be followed to find examples of how the data will look when visualized with Unidata clients. Jeff emphasized that input on the document’s organization and structure are welcome, and he invited committee input on it.
A case study project has always been popular with the Unidata community. Jeff reported on the successful evolution of the current project that originated with Mohan and COMET director, Tim Spangler. The project is internally funded by STORM funds generated via management fee to UCAR. Outside collaborators are a UNC-Charlotte team consisting of Dr. Brian Etherton, faculty advisor, and Ms. Shelly Holmberg, graduate student, who are creating the first series of case studies and the scientific write ups associated with them. The intent is for these case studies to be amendable and not static by using the THREDDS Data Repository to augment them and enrich them, and, when applicable, COMET learning modules.
In addition, they will be living or dynamic, allowing for the community to augment and add value to existing case studies by contributing related observations, analyses, educational, curricular, and multimedia materials, and other views on the case. An important element of that perspective is to build an easy to use framework in which community members can develop and build on future case studies.
The committee speculated that AWIPS-II development and the transition of N-AWIPS (GEMPAK) to AWIPS-II will impact many users during the next proposal period. Unidata will need to track those developments and may need to make course corrections during the period. The question of the type of open source license by Raytheon remains unanswered. Questions about porting GEMPAK to Java need to be answered. There was a discussion of a potential letter to NWS regarding the open source license, but no decision was made.
NSF (Jacobs)
NSF's budget funding remains a priority with the administration. A 7% projected annual growth through 2014 is anticipated. GEO's request for FY 2008 is up 5.9% over 2007. Congress has not passed any of the appropriation bills, and at this point, NSF, like other agencies, is operating on a continuing resolution. With the Thanksgiving break coming up, it seems likely that will continue to be the case.
There is strong support for climate change science, research on natural hazards, the near-term priorities of the Ocean Research Priorities Program, and in GEO funding fundamental research remains a priority.
In GEO news, the search for a director continues. Guided by a strong panel, the GEO-Vision 2007 document is nearing completion. The document is defined by an outline that includes four points: Planet Earth, The Earth--A Complex System, The Earth--A System of Change, and fourth, Meeting the Challenges. NSF is seeking community input for this document.
In agency-wide activity NSF seeks to define, then facilitate transformative research. It does this in several ways, among which is making small, SGER, grants for exploratory research. NSF has been tasked by the National Science Board to develop and Foundation wide Transformative Research Initiative. In response to the request, NSF developed a three-pronged approach that includes infusing support of Potentially Tranformative Research (PTR) across all programs, learning how to facilitate PTR, and leading the community through proposal funding possibilities for PTR. There was the comment that the NSB is not on board with all of these suggestions.
NASA (de La Beaujardiere)
Jeff created and implemented a NASA Unidata mailing list in July 2007. Its purpose is communicating Unidata information to NASA stakeholders. Thus far its membership is limited, but Jeff is confident it will grow. [NOTE: following the meeting Unidata staff forwarded a list of 191 NASA based users.]
Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services created a case study using the OPeNDAP 4 data server (Hyrax). The case study is composed of four principle components:
There's been positive feedback by its users and ultimately a THREDDS catalog will be created.
NASA funding opportunities include an Education and Public Outreach solicitation whose goal is supporting coordinating and integrating those activities. Four awards of 3.5M each, one in Earth Science, will be made.
In the NASA ROSES (Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences) six solicitations remain open in the following areas: Ocean Surface Topography, Earth Surface & Interior, EarthScope InSAR & Geodetic Imaging Component, Terrestrial Hydrology, and Energy & Water Cycle Ocean Biology & Biogeochemistry.
Discussion
The agenda item was framed by the following questions/points: 1) What is needed, 2) what is missing, 3) how can Unidata facilitate, and 4) related items, such as Unidata's contribution to facilitating IPCC AR5 Data Services.
Some indications of Unidata's presence in the climate community are already apparent. One is extensive use of netCDF in the climate community--almost all climate model output is stored and accessed in netCDF. Next, the broadly defined goals in the Strategic Plan are meant to comprehend it, and the Users Committee added a climate scientist to its membership a year ago.
Lawrence Buja, NCAR/CGD, joined the meeting for this agenda item, and opened the discussion with a presentation entitled Climate Data Case Study. In addition to nearly-comprehensive netCDF usage for data storage, the presentation also affirmed Unidata's visibility in metadata and data standards. In the climate data arena, data integrity is critical, and thus verification of its integrity is critical to the climate enterprise.
Discussion
Some discussion items:
The committee recognized that a move to include the climate community is a significant shift in the program's activities; but it seems clear that it is desirable.
UCAR President, Rick Anthes, opened the agenda item, providing a video illustrating the origins of the GPS-Met observing system that was launched in 1995 and was named SuomiNet for legendary scientist, Vern Suomi. GPS-Met was the precursor of COSMIC. Unidata, which participated in GPS-Met from its inception, continues to distribute the data on the IDD/LDM network. These data were and are available at no cost.
Following the SuomiNet video, Chris Rocken described the COSMIC data and provided a background of the program in a presentation. Presently six satellites orbit the earth and transfer data to three ground-based stations. The data benefit members of the meteorology, climate, ionosphere, and geodesy communities. Both research and education communities derive benefit from them.
At this time, like SuomiNet, COSMIC data are freely available upon approval of an e-mail request made to the National Space Organization (NSPO). The NPSO Director, along with UCAR President Anthes, reviews the requests. Thus far, every request has been approved. Users are also asked to cite COSMIC in publication and presentation materials.
The data are already ingested by operational centers like NCEP and ECMWF in their assimilation systems, and visualizations of some of the data have been created by Unidata's GEMPAK and IDV developers.
The Unidata survey
In an action item that originated at the July Policy Committee meeting, Unidata staff members, Policy Committee chair, together with Dr. Anthes, prepared a survey for distribution to the Unidata Community. Of fifty-five respondents, 27 percent were familiar with the data, and most of those (96%) received the data on the FORMOSAT feed. Respondents are enthusiastic about data distribution on Unidata's event-driven LDM and are in favor of visualization and analysis capabilities of the data becoming part of the IDV and GEMPAK.
Discussion
Some wrinkles remain in bringing COSMIC data to Unidata's user community through LDM, but at this time there's agreement that Unidata and COSMIC need to pursue solutions to effect the data delivery.
The recently-completed Strategic Plan will provide guidelines for structuring the 5-year funding proposal, and staff will develop a set of metrics to measure Unidata's effectiveness in realizing the goals. While this discussion ranged far and wide, its primary focus was software where (among others) the following points were made:
In discussion surrounding community and collaboration, the following points were made:
There was consensus among committee members that as part of its proposed activity in the next five years, Unidata should build bridges, or create spaces, or recognize commonalities among diverse disciplines or all of these. The concept of collective space did not exist three years ago, and it's important to recognize and be creative with that concept.
And, although the end of the proposal's period of performance is 2013, the proposal should, to some extent, look beyond that date.
Recognizing the need to interact with its user community, EOL,
Roger's presentation also included a couple of slides that were created and presented at the workshop by Unidata staff member Don Murray and Chris Burkhardt (EOL). IDV developers have actively pursued collaboration with EOL in field projects. A general view is that this is a good time to assess the role of Unidata tools, technologies, and services in facilitating the field project community.
Discussion
As noted earlier in the meeting, Unidata's five-year (2008-2013) funding proposal will be submitted in 2008 near the end of February or the beginning of March. This committee has provided input to the process beginning September 2006 through the May and July 2007 meetings to the present. The committee agreed that community expansion, including geodesy and air quality members is indicated. The committee, did not, however, prioritize the recommended inclusions. There was a suggestion that the intersection of the biosphere-atmosphere (biology/ecology) communities may seem far out, but it must be recognized and "on the radar."
In the area of atmospheric chemistry, the committee felt that Unidata should attempt to identify its role in data delivery and tool development for this community. The area is intimately connected with air quality analysis and thus the air quality community.
While there was recognition that while Unidata cannot move quickly on these ideas (can't be all things to all people, and must respect the core community) Unidata's proposal will explore these possibilities. At the same time, the program must be responsive to the needs of educators while maintaining and expanding the capabilities of the excellent visualization and analysis tools already in place.
The wrap-up portion focused on diversity: primarily, what steps should be
initiated to achieve it. There were a couple of specific suggestions: 1) A
Unidata representative at a diversity workshop to be held the last week of
March in
A second question was Unidata's role in the inclusion of community colleges in its community. Because this is a multi-faceted, complex topic, the discussion was tabled until a future meeting. However, there has been considerable e-mail dialog amongst committee members subsequent to the Policy Committee meeting.
Resolutions
The resolutions were approved by e-mail vote immediately following the meeting.
Action Items
The action items were reviewed following the meeting. E-mail suggested revisions are noted in parenthetic remarks.
Direct comments and questions to jhansen@unidata.ucar.edu