The UPC received 24 equipment award proposals totaling approximately $465K with overhead. We were quite surprised at the large number of proposals that were submitted this year. The six equipment awards panelists met the afternoon of April 12th and the morning of April 13th and made recommendations for this year's awards. To stay within the 100K budget, the panel recommended funding for seven of the twenty-four proposals. Of the seven proposals recommended for funding only two were accepted at the full budget amount. The panel recommended funding others anywhere from 43% - 86% of their original request. In all cases the panel was able to identify what could be dropped from the request so that it should be clear to the awardees what portion of their request is being funded.
Award letters will leave the UPC by mid-May. We expect to have contracts in place by mid-June barring any unforeseen problems.
This year (2005) we had a surprising number of really excellent proposals. Many of the panelists commented that a high percentage of the proposals were fundable if resources weren't so limited. In the next several months we hope to work with the Policy and Users Committee to focus the next RFP so that the denial rate isn't so high.
We will report the "winners" as soon as we have sent out award letters and received information to move forward.
A brief reminder of the awards in FY2004:
| Institution | Proposal | Funded Cost Including OH |
| University of Oklahoma | Real Time and Archival DODS/ADDE Server for the OU School of Meteorology and Unidata Community | $17,964 |
| Valparaiso University | An Expanded Data Storage System for the Department of Geography and Meteorology at Valparaiso University | $33,200 |
| Servico Publico Federal Universidade Federal do Para Centro De Geociencias Departmento de Meteorologia | Meteorology Laboratory for Research and Teaching Synoptic Meteorology, Numerical Weather Forecast, Atmospheric Dynamics, Physical Meteorology, Mesoscale Meteorology, Remote Sensing Meteorology, Tropical Meteorology and Climatology | $3,586 |
| San Jose State University | Deploying the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and Improving Internet Data Distribution (IDD) Capabilities | $31,208 |
| Central Michigan University | A Proposal to Upgrade Hardware for the Central Michigan University Unidata Server | $16,781 |
Total |
$102,738 |
|
Five of the ten proposals submitted were funded at some level.
The total request for funds was $183K in FY04.