Unidata Users Committee Meeting Summary
7-8 October 2004
Boulder, Colorado
Meeting Summary/Action Items/Resolutions
| Members |
UPC Staff: |
| |
|
| Jim Steenburgh, Univ of Utah, Chair |
Steve Chiswell |
| Elen Cutrim, Western Michigan Univ |
Ethan Davis |
| Charles Graves, St. Louis Univ |
Ben Domenico |
| Anton Kruger, Univ of Iowa |
Emily Doremire |
| Gary Lackman, North Carolina State Univ |
Steve Emmerson |
| Mark Laufersweiler, Univ of Oklahoma |
Joanne Graham |
| Michael Morgan, Univ of Wisc-Madison |
Jo Hansen |
| Donna Tucker, Univ of Kansas |
Jeff McWhirter |
| Michael Voss, San Jose State Univ |
Linda Miller |
| Tom Whittaker, SSEC-Univ of Wisconsin-Madison |
Don Muray |
| |
Jennifer Oxelson |
| |
Sandra Petrie |
| |
Mohan Ramamurthy |
| |
Russ Rew |
| |
Jeff Weber |
| Guest: Jack Fellows, present for part of first day |
Ann Wilson |
| |
Tom Yoksas |
| |
|
Administrative:
- Proposed Meeting Date: 11-12 April 2005
- Thanks to outgoing Users Committee members: Michael Morgan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Mark Laufersweiler, University of Oklahoma
- Newly appointed members include: Gary Lackman, North Carolina State University
and Kevin Knupp, University of Alabama- Huntsville
Review of Action Items:
- Policy Committee is decreasing meeting frequency to two meetings per year
- Usercomm has option for a third if necessary, but believes cybermeetings
may be more useful
- Floater issue - see discussion embedded in summary below
- Discussed evaluation of NCAR/UCAR
- Newsletter good
- Digest action item was not completed-suggestion to evaluate by sending
a Community email
- Mark Laufersweiler contacted Peter Neilley about the Weather program -
no current plans to place the Weather program on G-Forge or SourceForge (issue
of up dates and moderators). Mark has agreed to contact Peter Neilley regarding
the future of Weather, with his efforts independent of Unidata.
Policy Committee Report - Jim Steenburgh
- Number of meetings per year decreased from three to two
- No plans for a merger of Unidata with NCAR
- New NASA Representative on Policy Committee-Mike Goodman
- Mesonet data from Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC)-
Brazil-(Tom Yoksas is working toward distribution of Mesonet data)
- Positive Unidata report provided by Mohan Ramamurthy
- NSF pessimistic report
- Greater percentage of funding granted to multiple PIs
- CUAHSI-five observatories-10M hydrologic-based observatories
- Policy Committee will be addressing hydrology in Arlington with CUAHSI, USGS, NWS and NSF representatives
- AMS Heads & Chairs Meeting, UCAR Members Meeting, UCAR Board of Trustees Meeting taking place at UCAR week of 11 October 2004
Director's Report - Mohan Ramamurthy
PDF Version , PowerPoint Slide Show
- Welcome to new members
- Monthly newsletter
- Need community feedback
- Regional workshop
- Need additional participation
- Community Service
- AGU, AMS, EGU
- Equipment Awards-
o question of overhead for universities (universities are typically required to follow their institution's regulations)
- ITR collaborative project with Anton-Hydrology ITR proposal-Witold Krajewski, Anton, Jim Smith, Mohan-4 year effort hydrology and NEXRAD data
- New Organization structure
- 22 universities, 8 research labs - 63 hosts in 43 unique domains - WSR-88D Level II data for use in education & research
- Global community - LDM/IDD Brazil, Taiwan, So America, Europe, Asia
- RT Data flows
o 225 machines 129 network domains running LDM6 reporting real time statistics
o 59 hosts at 33 domains now on CONDUIT
o 22 universities, 8 research and 63 hosts in 43 unique domains
- State of Program
o Comm. Relations-green
o Data flows-green
o Data sources-green
o s/w development-yellow
o collaborations-green
o staffing-yellow to green
o support-green
o space-green
o finances-green
Status Reports
- Community Services - Miller, Weber, Hansen
- DODS/OPeNDAP - Ho
- Equipment Awards - Graham/Petrie
- GEMPAK - Chiswell
- IDV Development - Murray
- IDD/LDM - Chiswell, Emmerson, Schmidt, Weber, Yoksas
- LEAD - Baltzer, Lindholm
- McIDAS & MeteoForum - Yoksas
- NLDM - Wilson
- NetCDF - Rew, Hartnett
- Support - Yoksas
- THREDDS - Domenico, Caron
Discussion:
- Common data model-netcdf-java--other data can be read through netcdf (grib,
gini, nids--will be converted to applications)
- IDV
o IDV-used by earth sciences community in GEO ITR project, Earthscope will use LDM-130-150M project
o IDV to be used for RICO project
o Discussion of postscript output versus other outputs
- Support email traffic continues to be high volume
- CBTEC-inserting data back to Unidata will eventually provide data to community
- GEMPAK decoders -local model output -share that output to Unidata community
- Steve Emmerson and Anne Wilson are working together on NLDM and LDM for the best path for data distribution
- NetCDF and HDF5-question of compatibility with HDF4
o the project funding (from NASA) does not include tasks to help reading HDF4
- FAQs and search engines were discussed
o Direct Unidata support is good and community likes/appreciates it
Regional Workshop-Elen Cutrim, Don Murray, Tom Whittaker
- Grad students like the IDV
- Aviation students-Embry Riddle
- More time needed for planning and advertising
- Need more participation from community
- Millersville provided good space and excellent facilities, and Rich Clark and David Fitzgerald were good hosts
- Idea of regional workshops - supported by Users Committee
- UPC staff did a good job of organizing-intro, training, sample data, good tutorial
- IDV needs to provide ease of use in making the s/w available
- Training materials are geared toward workshop
- Should CD-ROM be considered for installation?
- Sharing of bundles - IDV-need community input and implement
- Elen indicated that Brazil is using bundles for different phenomenon
- Regional workshops need to appeal to current and new users
Discussion:
Elen Cutrim and Mike Voss both offered to host the next Regional Workshop.
They will do some research on likely participation and apprise the committee.
Should d consider having two organizers (both within proximity) to organize
the workshop
ACTION: Elen and Mike will survey interests in their region for a workshop and provide an email recommendation to the Users Committee who will select the site for the next Regional Workshop.
Jack Fellows announced that planning is underway for an instrumentation workshop for faculty. This workshop is in response to a request by the UCAR academic community.
Executive Session-DeSouza Award - selection and coordination to present at AMS Annual Meeting-Internet Apps, Web Portals and Cyberinfrastructure Meeting-8:15 a.m.-Wed, 1/12/04
The committee concluded there are merits to having a 30-minute Executive Session during each Users Committee meeting. This will become a scheduled item of the Users Committee meeting.
LEAD Brown Bag Lunch-Mohan Ramamurthy (post slides)-end users to interact with the weather through a Web based interface through LEAD portal. LEAD is creating a toolkit through a framework created by the LEAD collaborators. The goal of LEAD is to create integrated scalable framework that allows analysis tools, forecast models and data repositories to be used as dynamically adaptive on-demand systems.
Discussion: Question of Grid-is it practical to run at one's PC (when comparing to power company). Grid services are web services running in a Grid framework.
Floater -Tom Yoksas
There were very few responses from the community regarding continuation of floaters. The satellite floater can eventually be discontinued, but radar floater could be replaced by the addition of automatic floater. See: http://motherlode.ucar.edu/unidata/images/nids/gdradr.html
Discussion:
- ADDE site at Wisconsin has all data
- GOES ingest is being set up at UPC
- Level II feed contains a lot of data so people could become familiar with the data if a floater was developed from the feed.
ACTION: The UPC can terminate the level III radar floater
at any time. The satellite floater can also be deleted once the current users
are notified of alternative options. The Users Committee also requests that
the UPC implement a Level II floater based on Unidata automated selection scheme.
A newsletter article will be developed about turning off all floaters by the
next meeting.
- Question of OPeNDAP-similar to ADDE-can also use client to access data. NCDC running an OPeNDAP server for IDV
- UPC will work with Millersville on this transition
Equipment Awards - Joanne Graham
The process was discussed. Do we need to screen more or just treat it as a
competitive process and if a proposal does not cover all criteria, the panel eva
luates accordingly.
- Is there room for clarification in the process?
- RFP process needs to clear up misconception about charging for data
- Concern about quality of articles based on broader impacts of award
- Guidelines should be described in award letter
- Guidelines should be in RFP and award letter (perhaps six principle areas)
NOAAPort DVB-S Broadcast - Mike Voss, Tom Yoksas, Steve Chiswell
- Inexpensive technology-Unidata has a working system now and is exploring system
costs
- Terrestrial interference with the DVB-S system (need larger dish than the
Radio Shack solution)
- All data will not be available using this technique-no global model grids
- Bandwidth issue-will the community buy their own dish
- Oklahoma Climate Survey-wants software to test
- Support issue-testing with a few sites-must share burden and support?
- Need this type of system for IDD ingest sites
Unidata will continue to monitor progress on DVB-S broadcast and keep the Users
Committee apprised.
IDV Task Force - Tom Whittaker
- Unhappy with the lack of participation, so requests option of changing membership on the IDV Task Force
- Several names have emerged as interested in participating on the task force
- Tom will coordinate and contact the potential members
o Gary Lackman and Mark Laufersweiler have already volunteered
- Needs feedback for more useful approach-canned datasets and procedures
Phone Survey Responses - All
The Users Committee shared the responses received from the phone survey they
have been conducting on behalf of the UPC. The responses will be placed into
a chart for review by the committee at the next meeting. There are some actions
that will be taken by the UPC to assist with some misconceptions and problems
that were discussed during the phone conversations. These responses are very
helpful for the UPC. They go far to determine the pulse of the community and
provide important feedback for the UPC endeavors.
Action: Users Committee members will call two constituent sites prior to the next meeting.
Summer Workshop Planning - Mark Laufersweiler and Michael Morgan
Mark and Michael shared their experiences as co-chairs from the last summer workshop.
- Visit the developer was popular
- Scholarship idea needs to be fostered
- Posters would be valuable, but need to designate someone to coordinate the activity
- Need to move faster in the beginning of the planning process
- "Hands on" was an important aspect of the workshop
Discussion:
- Bring more meteorology into the workshop-modeling (WRF), MM5, GEON, LEAD, Hydrology to GIS
- Use of Unidata systems-can we combine the workshop with the WRF training workshop
- Ask people in community about Modeling as workshop title-find out their reaction and suggestions
- Logistically - identify key speakers-poster session-date (check calendars, organizations
- April meeting - select dates, contact organizations about dates
- Schedule-1 year in advance-dates
- 7 mos before-major speakers, content, keynotes
- 6 mos in advance-registration - cut off one month in advance
- April meeting-decide on topic, chairs, select proposal focal point to work with Joanne Graham
- WRF-MM5 workshops are last week of June
o Caution on two weeks of training, if combined with WRF workshop-long commitment away from home
- WRF workshop and WRF tutorial-data assimilation
- Visit the Developer-ask questions-include someone from WRF
- Field colleagues for speakers at summer workshop
- Talk to people at AMS and AGU meetings to apprise them of the workshop
- Logistics-broadband access-hotel versus campus dorms
- Should education be an emphasis -use in classroom
- NCAR community model workshop-check times for conflicts
- WRF focus-turnkey package for module using WRF
- John Nielsen-Gammon-education version of WRF model
ACTION: The Users Committee has identified modeling in the atmospheric and related sciences as a possible topic for the next summer workshop. At the upcoming April meeting, the title will be finalized, chairs selected, and preliminary list of presenters and topics compiled. Users Committee members should start the process of identifying possible speakers/topics prior to the April meeting.
Case Study Transition -Ben Domenico and Jeff Weber
Technology used to augment documentation-(Sample Data Interactive Publication:
Interactive -access data on remote servers-create a THREDDS catalog - list of
events during a phenomenon.
- Begin with WebStart-brings up IDV
- Creates educational modules, create exercise
- Idea is you can look at data as part of case study and get current data
for comparison
- Uses the IDV for viewing
- Provides ability for a user to bring up the application, need mechanism
in place
to access data sets
- Revolutionizes scientific publications
- major change in publishing scientific results and papers
- Advances in image input to IDV
- Georeferenced images
- Meteorology data and images after the fact-can bring all data into the IDV
- Can include pointers to documentation
Discussion:
- Question of viability of document-timeliness-will document still behave
in same
way?
- Referencing in scientific publication-how do you do it? Archiving?
Discussion of future Survey - All
After extended discussion about a future survey, the Users Committee proposed
the following
Resolution:
The Users Committee supports the recommendation of the Unidata 2008 review panel that the Policy Committee, in collaboration with the Users Committee, develop an evaluation strategy for the Unidata Program and solicit the assistance of an independent external group in this effort.
COMET Survey-Doug West
Doug West provided a COMET survey with the theme of improving services to
universities. Doug distributed the survey to the Users Committee for completion.
COMET plans to check and eventually distribute the survey to the community.
Miscellaneous:
The 2005 DLESE Data Services Workshop will be held April 18-20 at the Beaver
Run Resort & Conference Center in Breckenridge CO. The theme is Earth Systems
Studies of the Water Cycle and Human Impacts.
Policy Committee Representative
It is important for a Policy Committee representative to participate at Users Committee meetings.
ACTION: A designated alternate should attend if regular committee representatives cannot attend.
The meeting adjourned at 11:40 a.m.
Linda Miller, Community Services , Unidata
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000
303-497-8646 fax: 303-497-8690
