Unidata Users Committee Meeting Summary
June 20, 1997
(Draft)

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Participants:

Members:                                   Visitors:

Mohan Ramamurthy (Chair)                   Mary Marlino
David Dempsey        
David Knight                               UPC Staff:
Michael Morgan
Charles Murphy                             Sally Bates
Melanie Wetzel                            Steve Chiswell
                                           Ethan Davis
                                           Ben Domenico
Ex-Officio Members:
 			                   Linda Miller
Dan Vietor, ATAC                           Don Murray
                                           Sandra Nilsson
                                           Mike Schmidt
				           Tom Yoksas

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Administrative Matters

The next meeting date was proposed for 13-14 October, 1997. Several UserComm members were absent so the date has not been confirmed.

Action 1 from the Action Items was deferred until the October meeting. This action pertained to announcing the UserComm meetings to the community and soliciting community input for the meeting.

Sandra Nilsson responded to Action 5 indicating that the follow up with WSI about access to NIDS data at 4 hour delays, rather than 48 hour delays was unsuccessful. WSI contends that data used for research and education should not be hampered by such a delay.

Mary Marlino said that a UserComm representative would be welcome at the Program for Advancement of Geophysical Education (PAGE) meetings. The PAGE program was renamed from the GREATT program.

Tom Yoksas provided an overview of the platform independent issues and future directions of Unidata. The plan as proposed in the Unidata Five-Year Proposal to the NSF details the development of a Java application that incorporates the current applications and makes them available to the Unidata community. He addressed the resolutions and actions from the March 13-14 meeting.

Discussion:

The UserComm should play a role in defining timelines toward building capabilities incrementally toward the JAVA based Geosif (see Unidata: 2003 Proposal to National Science Foundation)

Charlie Murphy suggested that there should be a sub-committee created of 4-8 people to represent the Unidata community to define the capabilities for the early design phase of the project. This generated much discussion on methods to be used for collecting community reaction and input for the future.

Among suggestions for collecting community input were:

• Contact the representatives from the community who are not using Unidata software to find out what they are using and what they would like to use
• Create a focus group to make recommendations for the development of the Java application
• Conduct a forum at the next AMS meeting on what the new weather analysis and display package should look like
• Use the six-month Unidata training workshop to gather input from the participants

It was agreed that a large portion of the next UserComm meeting will be devoted to the topic of the steps to be taken to provide input to the UPC toward the Geosif and Java development.

Mohan Ramamurthy gave a summary from the Unidata Policy Committee meeting. Unidata Policy Committee Action 2 (The Unidata users Committee needs to articulate the needs of the Unidata community for NEXRAD data streams, both currently and in the foreseeable future). This Action was tabled until the next Users Committee meeting.

Steve Chiswell provided a de-briefing on Unidata solutions to satellite data reception problems at some sites.

The majority of the meeting was spent on workshop coordination issues.

Questions or comments can be sent to lmiller@unidata.ucar.edu

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