Unidata Users Committee

Action Items and Resolution to the Unidata Policy Committee - 9-10 November 2000

1. Robb Kambic and Jeff Weber will contact the sites that are not providing the stats to assist them in setting up the collection at their site. They will report to the UserComm at the next meeting on success.

2. Domenico will check the NASA digital earth and the NASA/TRMM project about lessons learned in metadata standards.

3. Anne Wilson will take the lead in conducting a test to distribute the NIDS (Level III) products made available (for testing purposes) from the NWS via NOAAPort. The test will be performed between Unidata and a site to send data and to evaluate the first and second tier results. Test results will be provided to the Users Committee for review by Thanksgiving (November 23, 2000).

4. A communication, from the Users Committee, will be provided to the Unidata community about planning and implementation procedures needed to use the 88D data from NOAAPort in January 2001. This information will include recommendations about ADDE access to data, lack of mosaic (currently provided by WSI), and floater potential.

5. Jeff Weber will contact robust sites about providing backup capabilities to the Wisconsin solution for Difax. This will provide the redundancy needed, should the Wisconsin server goes down for maintenance or other reasons.

6. A sub-committee consisting of Rich Clark Arlene Laing, Clint Rowe, Tony Rockwood, Michael Morgan, and ex-officio member Charlie Murphy was formed to create a brief set of questions to be used for a community survey.

7. UserComm members will begin a campaign of contacting the Unidata community representatives to survey them with the aforementioned questions. The UserComm will provide a report on this method of community contact at the next Users Committee meeting.

8. An updated map with new SuomiNet sites should be created. The map should depict newly activated or implemented sites. - Jeff Weber

9. Jeff Weber will ask Unavco and GST if the data can be distributed in netCDF.

10. Contact Mary desJardins about transitioning or adding the 24-bit capability for GEMPAK - Steve Chiswell

11. Set up a Web page with Unidata sites currently using AMDARS and ACARS so other sites can learn more about the use of the data sets for classroom and research activities - Linda Miller

12. The CONDUIT project and associated datasets are important. Priorities should be established for which data sets are required for the interested users - Linda Miller

Resolution to the Unidata Policy Committee:

The growth in both the volume and number of data resources in the atmospheric and related sciences imposes challenges in data distribution by existing methods. The availability of data for all of the WSR-88D radars is one example of these expanding resources. The Unidata Users Committee recognizes the need for new data access and distribution methodologies and believes the concept of Thematic Realtime Earth Data Distribution Servers (THREDDS) offers a viable solution to data access in an environment of growing resources. The Unidata Users Committee urges the Unidata Policy Committee to consider the development of THREDDS as an important future direction for the Unidata Program and further to encourage the National Science Foundation to provide support for the development and implementation of this technology within the Unidata community.