Status Report
Linda Miller, External Liaison
October 2003-March 2004

Work referenced within this report is based on advocacy, community outreach, and identifying new data sources and distribution trends within the community, associated with "Endeavor 1: Responding to a broader and more diverse community" and "Endeavor 2: Comprehensive Support Services, [Data services, systems, and tools]" from the Unidata 2008 Proposal. There is overlap of external activities in the areas of "Real-time, self-managing data flows" (Endeavor 3), Endeavor 4: Software to analyze and visualize geoscience data", along with "Distributed, organized collections of digital material" (Endeavor 5), and "Improved data access infrastructure" (Endeavor 6).

Community Outreach

• Coordinated Unidata seminars. The seminars are a mix of Unidata staff presentations and other important activities taking place at UCAR/NCAR and other external activities important to Unidata.
  • Mohan Ramamurthy-Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) Seminar-November 2003.
  • Yuan Ho and Ethan Davis- OPeNDAP and THREDDS: Access and Discovery of Distributed Scientific Data-January 2004.
• Attended the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco, 10-8 December, 2003.
• Attended the MeteoForum meeting in Seattle on 11 January 2004.
• Co-Chair of the International Conference of Interactive Information Processing Systems Symposium, held 12-15 January 2004 at the AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington. Thirteen Unidata papers were submitted for oral and poster presentations for the Annual meeting.
  • Co-chaired the Internet Applications, Web Portals and Cyberinfrastructure session. (arranged for the DeSouza Community Award, prior to the session).

Data Access and Distribution

• Worked with Kelvin Droegemeier and Bob Gall to plan the CONDUIT-CRAFT (C2) Steering Meeting held on 14 January 2004.
• Coordination of Call for Participation, with NOAA/NWS, for Level II data distribution. Focal point for the NWS concerning the Level II data distribution effort.
  • 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. 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 was crafted by the Department of Commerce/NOAA lawyers for each academic site selected to 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 selected 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).
• Case Studies and DODS
  • Due to lack of funding, new case studies have not been available during this status reporting period, however interest remains high in obtaining case study data.
    • Jeff Weber and Yuan Ho will report on the case study status.
  • Ethan Davis and Yuan Ho will report on DODS-OPeNDAP status.

Miscellaneous

• Invited to participate in the President’s Council Retreat, which included 37 UCAR/NCAR staff, in a one-day Retreat to discuss organizational issues.
• Co-chaired a session in"The Future of Regional Real-Time Numerical Weather Prediction" at the USWRP workshop, December 13, 2003 in Boulder, entitled, “Problems with Accessing Gridded Data.”
• Attended the MeteoForum meeting on 11 January 2004. (See Tom Yoksas' MeteoForum report).
• Participated in the National Weather Service Family of Services/NOAAPort meeting and the NOAA Partners' meeting in Seattle.
• Coordinated with staff concerning the first Unidata orientation for new Users Committee representatives.
  

Linda Miller
External Liaison, Unidata
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
303-497-8646