Russell L. DeSouza Award

THIS ACKNOWLEDGES
Harold J. Edmon, University of Washington

Harry's involvement in Unidata is long and legendary. As Harry himself likes to joke, he's been participating since before its inception. And this is true. Unidata traces its birth to a conference held in Madison, Wisconsin in July 1983. Harry was involved in many of the planning sessions that preceded that workshop. His name appears on an appendix on a report entitled "The Unidata System for University Weather Analysis and Modeling," written under the direction of John Dutton (Pennsylvania State University) as a planning document to guide the July meeting. He was also a member of the Ad Hoc Unidata Implementation Strategy Committee, whose goals were to broadly specify and design the "UNIDATA system" and identify a strategy to implement that system. This committee met in June and prepared a report by early July 1983.

Harry received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from Purdue University in December 1977 and then moved to the University of Washington as a postdoctoral student from 1978-80. His interest and ability in computing, however, changed the direction of his career. His expertise in computing led his colleagues to involve Harry when the idea of a Unidata program started to coalesce, And Unidata has been relying on that expertise ever since. From the beginning, Unidata has sought assistance from a group of technical experts, first under the name of the Implementation Working Group (IWG), now under the label of the Advanced Technical Advisory Committee (ATAC).

Harry's involvement has been continuous. He was the ATAC representative to the Users Committee until 1997, when he began representing the ATAC at the Policy Committee. As a result, he has been member of every committee governing the Unidata Program--no small contribution of time and patience!

Harry's contributions extend far beyond committee work, however. Ask any member of Unidata's technical staff what comes to mind when Harry's name is mentioned and the unanimous response is "bug fixes!" His most memorable contribution was his report of problems with the LDM5--the first version of the software designed to receive/forward data over the Internet. "We had seen that early test versions of the LDM5 performed poorly in some cases," Russ Rew remembers, "but we were unable to easily isolate the problem. Harry, however, helped diagnose the slowdown in a classic five-line email message I still have. It not only convinced us that it WAS an LDM software problem, but also made it easy to determine where the problem originated and what needed to be done to fix it. The IDD works as well as it does today partly because of Harry Edmon's work helping us test early versions, and his precise reports of anomalies he observed."

Harry was also instrumental in enabling the CRAFT project. CRAFT (for Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test) is a University of Oklahoma effort to access and distribute NEXRAD Level II radar data in near real time. Harry developed the prototype for capturing and compressing the data using the LDM and feeding the data to another (non-LDM-based) system. (In this effort, he was building on his earlier contribution of writing a decoder that transformed NIDS data from WSI into the McIDAS AREA file format. This decoder is what allows Unidata users to display and manipulate NIDS data with McIDAS.) Harry's long tenure has imbued him with a certain philosophical view of today's hot issues. "The technology may be changing, but the arguments about it never change," he remarks. "We aways want faster computers and more data; we just can't always agree on what this means."