International Activities and Collaborations
Spring/Summer/Fall 2010

Strategic Focus Areas

These efforts support three of the funding proposal's six focus areas:

1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
4. Enhancing user support services
6. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities

UPC International outreach activities remain largely unchanged since the last User Committee meeting in Spring, 2010.

Unidata hosted two Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) sessions at the AGU 2010 Joint Assembly in Iguassu Falls, Brazil in August, 2010. It also conducted a one day short course on Data Access, Use and Sharing on the Sunday immediately before the meeting.
Tom Yoksas was the ESSI Program Committee representative for the meeting and proposed, designed, and led the short course along with colleagues from INPE/CPTEC in Brazil (Waldenio Gambi de Almeida), the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal (Guilherme Chagas), and CICESE in Baja, Mexico (Luis Farfan).
The short course was a logical follow-up to the Latin American Data Workshop that was held on the Universidade de São Paulo campus in São Paulo, Brazil on August 21-23, 2008. It focused on availability and use of ESSI-related Unidata offerings: LDM/IDD, IDV, THREDDS, RAMADDA and also highlighted capabilities made available by NOAA/NCDC (NOMADS), INPE/CPTEC (BUFR package), and CICESE (Mexico, application of Unidata products in the forecast of Baja Mexico hurricanes).

Unidata hosted Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) sessions at the EUMETSAT 2010 Users Conference held in Cordoba, Spain in September, 2010. Tom Yoksas was the Scientific Programme Committee representative for ESSI for this meeting.
This invited section (invited by Volker Gaertner, PI for the meeting and Head of Training in EUMETSAT) was successful enough (approx. 50 audience members in all sessions) that EUMETSAT wants to include the section in the program for its 2011 Users Conference that will be held in Oslo, Norway.

A variety of groups in UCAR, including Unidata, actively sought and were awarded funding from Google.org for support of the development of a prototype Earth Gauging System in Africa. Initial activities in this effort have been aimed at numerical weather forecasting in support of meningitis epidemic management in northern Ghana. Unidata's role is centered on application of its technologies in support of research and data accumulation and dissemination efforts. Unidata software packages that are/will be prominently featured in this effort are the LDM/IDD, IDV, RAMADDA, THREDDS, and the ADDE component of McIDAS-X.

Use of Unidata tools, especially netCDF and the IDV, continues to grow internationally

Data from UCAR GOES East/West/South ingest systems have been routinely accessed by international users in North, Central and South America using McIDAS-X, IDV, and McIDAS-V. The system used to ingest GOES-10 data was dedicated to ingestion of GOES-12 data when GOES-12 wass repurposed for South American surveillance in May, 2010.