Good day everyone,
With the recent loss of 3 extremely valuable UNIDATA staff members, I wanted to
inquire UNIDATA concerning several disturbing trends that I have been seeing
with the organization. And quite frankly, what I discovered is disconcerting.
Over the past several years, UNIDATA has been moving away from what it was
funded to do, namely: provide weather data, software, and support to the
University community for teaching, and also for research:
"Unidata is a diverse community of education and research institutions with the
common goal of sharing geoscience data and the tools to access and visualize
that data." - https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/about
With this stated goal, excellent software packages used to support the
educational and research communities have either been retired. or development
has stopped...with minimal input from the user community. These software
packages include GEMPAK, McIDAS, LDM (which hasn't been touched on GitHub since
Steve Emmerson retired), as well as others. In fact, McIDAS was sunset without
any announcement or input from universities.
When I brought these concerns to the Unidata User Committee chair, Victor
Gensini, I found out that he had resigned nearly a month ago. This, again, was
done without any announcement to the community. The User's Committee is much
more than an advisory board; it is one of shared governance. And the decisions
made over the past several years have now culminated in an utter lack of
transparency with the recent loss of staff. In a scientific community, the
governing process must involve transparency to the highest extent possible to
maintain integrity of the staff, community, services they provide, data, and
success for end users.
This is already starting to have a profoundly negative effect at the College of
DuPage, which prompted me to write this. Even though we are a community
college, we believe in UNIDATA's stated vision and have shared our data via our
website to all. Our setup here shares the weather data as much as we are able.
Without UNIDATA's McIDAS, GEMPAK, WXP and other software packages, we will not
be able to share this data with others; additionally, we will not be able to
teach the next generation of students with adequate software tools in a time
where interest in the atmospheric sciences is about to peak. As a result, we
have started to migrate towards commercial solutions to fill in the gaps. In
the first 20 years of UNIDATA, that would be unthinkable.
What is being supported? IDV is being built on a dying platform (Java), with
apparently very few users, and one of the two AWIPS developers was one of the
three people let go. What is left? Two of these staff members were the future
of UNIDATA, and the other took care of critical systems and engagement with
underserved communities. Who is doing that now? Nobody has answered these
questions.
Complete transparency has been and continues to be absolutely critical to the
success that highlighted UNIDATA's efforts over many years. These decisions
have been made in darkness. Where leadership has been required, silence has
occurred. It should not have been left to a terminated employee to make that
announcement on his own free will.
I am saying this with all sincerity because I believe that UNIDATA is going
off-mission. I am speaking out like this because I am gravely concerned that
UNIDATA has lost it's way, delving into areas beyond what it was supposed to
be, while failing to maintain and flourish what it's mission statement demands.
The end result has been the loss of critical software and support that we need,
as an educational institution. And let's be blunt here: if the
https://weather.cod.edu site went down, a lot of Universities who use us would
be in trouble. We know, because we see the number of "hits" from them in our
web logs. And, if the LDM isn't maintained, especially with major NOAAport/SBN
feed changes on the horizon, the very backbone of the NWS data feed is in
jeopardy. If McIDAS isn't maintained, our satellite imagery goes away. And
despite requests for Canadian radar data and other datasets that can be helpful
(several Canadian radars cover portions of the border states reasonably well),
not a yes or a no has been spoken to me.
UNIDATA, as a DeSouza award winner, I beg that you turn back to what made you
great: tried and true, as well as new software...data and software for all of
us, and unquestionable, excellent support.
With respect,
Gilbert Sebenste
Meteorology Support Analyst
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