Concerns about distribution of Unidata McIDAS-X to institutions outside of the United States (e.g., CPTEC/INPE in Brazil and CONAE in Argentian) resulted in a letter a letter of clarification for distribution of Unidata McIDAS-X to better identify who may be allowed to legally download Unidata's distribution of McIDAS-X. The letter reaffirms Unidata's right to distribute McIDAS-X to the "international university community" while providing guidelines for which institutions may be regarded to be members of that community.
Solutions to problems that remain with decoding GRIB2 messages will be made available in an addendum as soon as possible.
A special McIDAS training session for INPE/CPTEC (Brazil) is slated to be held from December 1-14 at the CPTEC training facility in Cachoeira Paulista. CPTEC is fully funding this training event.
The majority of new interest in Unidata McIDAS is coming from organizations outside of the US.
In October, 2006, UCAR submitted this proposal to NESDIS which funded it for the full requested amount of $30K.
On the evening of January 30, Unidata successfully began ingesting GOES-10 (referred to internally as GOES-South) imagery using equipment that had been surplused by various groups in NCAR/UCAR and the Unidata community (e.g., retired USAN satellite dish from NCAR/CISL; TeraScan (tm) satellite receiver (SeaSpace Inc.) from NCAR/RAL; PC satellite ingest card from the Weather Underground, Inc., etc.), and McIDAS SDI software licensed from the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On Wednesday, January 31 GOES-South imager sectors were integrated into the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream (IDD feedtype UNIWISC) for the benefit of the US and increasingly international Unidata community, especially university participants in Latin America. Any system participating in the IDD has access to the data (currently over 400 systems at over 210 sites). GOES-South imagery is now accessible to any ADDE-enabled application (e.g., McIDAS, IDV, etc.) with Internet access.
The establishment of GOES-10 ingest capabilities in UCAR was a large portion of Rick Anthes President's Corner article in the March 2007 UCAR newsletter.
SDI interface cards donated to the UPC by the LSU/SRCC and St. Louis University will be used to establish a GOES-East and GOES-West ingest and ADDE serving capability in UCAR and as spare parts (active, Schmidt, Yoksas).
Activities:
March-May, 2007:
Summer-Fall, 2007:
Fall-Winter, 2007/2008:
Ingest of GOES-East imagery has been accomplished and is routinely available via ADDE. Ingest of GOES-West imagery has been tested.
Full resolution GOES-East/West imagery is also available via ADDE from a Unidata-owned, toplevel IDD relay node housed in the SSEC Data Center. This same machine hosts a rolling multi-month, realtime archive of images broadcast in the IDD Unidata-Wisconsin datastream.
SSEC provides and supports the Unidata DVB-S NOAAport ingest system for its licensed users of McIDAS-XCD.
User Support occasionally gets questions on the NOAAPort ingest software package, but the support burden caused by the inquiries is insignificant.
The NOAAPort ingest system installed at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica continues to function as designed. Problems, however, regularly occur as oxidation builds up in a N-connector coupling that was added by the company that re-aimed the satellite for NOAAPort use. After the oxidation is removed by UCR personnel, data ingestion returns to normal. Notably, UCR will be connecting to Internet2 in the not too distant future. This augmentation of internet connectivity will allow for the receipt of high resolution model data (e.g., CONDUIT data) that will be used in local modeling efforts. It will also allow the UCR to take a leading role in the provision of real-time data in Central America through the establishment of the IDD-Caribe.
This NOAAPort reception system installation is a high profile undertaking at the UCR, so its continued success remains important for Unidata. (Yoksas)
by Tom Yoksas.