Community Services Status Report

October 2004 - May 2005

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).

Note: This report combines the activities of Jo Hansen, Linda Miller and Jeff Weber.

Community Outreach

  • Publication of monthly online newsletters has continued. The
    newsletter, now dubbed the Unidata CommunitE-letter, has been successful
    from all indications. We published a special edition issue for the AGU
    (just prior to) and another for the AMS.
  • The collection of articles written by seven of the presenters at the
    Users 2003 workshop was published in In-Box section of the February 2005
    BAMS:

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society VOLUME 86 NUMBER 2
February 2005.

  • Community group members initiated an update to the Unidata web
    site's data page. The idea is to streamline, simplify, provide the
    necessary information, and making the data section easy to surf.


Unidata Seminar Series coordination. Webcasting is being done for most of the seminars now so they can reach out to the broader community. The presentations are available shortly after each seminar, along with the archived Webcast. Seminars during this period were:

  • Plans for AWIPS Next Generation
    Darien Davis, NOAA/FSL
  • The Developmental Testbed Center
    Bob Gall, NCAR and Steve Koch, NOAA/FSL
  • NetCDF-Java version 2.2 and the Common Data Model
    John Caron, Unidata
  • Unidata.binaries.data: Have Some Data With Your Coffee?
    Anne Wilson, Unidata

Continue to foster internal and external collaborations

  • Communicating Science Expo (for internal UCAR/NCAR divisions)
  • Education and Outreach for external exposure for using Unidata tools and data

Create compound documents that show the versatility and ease of use of the IDV in educational and research settings

  • this was a topic at the DLESE Data Services Workshop April 18-20

Participating on the UCAR Metrics Committee

  • Data Metrics sub-committee - convened by Rick Anthes

Participated in the following meetings:

  • NOAA's Stakeholder's Meeting
  • AMS Annual Meeting
    • Serving as IIPS Co-Chair (Miller) -planning underway for 2006 meeting in Atlanta
    • Coordinated DeSouza Award Presentation prior to the Internet Applications, Web Portals and Cyberinfrastructure Session
  • CONDUIT-CRAFT (C2) 11 January 2005 Meeting
  • AGU Fall Meeting
    • Co-convenor of special focus session, "Cyberinfrastructure for Earth Systems Science" (session included co-convenors Ben Domenico, Steve Hankin, Anton Kruger, David Maidment, Phil Sharfstein

Data Access and Distribution:

  • TAMDAR (Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Report) data come from a
    "turn-key" sensor package (as opposed to the aircraft's own weather
    sensors) which has its own communications (ORBCOM).
    • 12,000 observations a day during the test period called the "Great Lake Fleet
      Experiment" from 64 aircraft.
    • TAMDAR sensor suite includes temperature, winds, humidity, icing, and turbulence (eddy dissipation rate (EDR) algorithm) parameters.
    • Available in the MADIS aircraft data feed using point-to-point LDM technology, as well as
      Web based and FTP access. Other aircraft data (i.e. ACARS, AMDAR) are also
      available.

Latest Activity :

Completed organization of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) special session, "Earth Systems Science Data Access, Distribution and Use for Education and Research," held 25-29 April 2005. Convenor is Elen Cutrim with co-convenors Mohan Ramamurthy, Stefano Nativi and Linda Miller. Presentations by Mohan Ramamurthy, Tom Yoksas and Linda Miller.