Community Services

Community Services Status Report

April 2009 -> October 2009

Note: This report combines the activities of Jo Hansen, Linda Miller, and Jeff Weber

The group's work supports each of the funding proposal's six focus areas:

1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
2. Advancing data services
3. Developing and deploying useful tools
4. Enhancing user support services
5. Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
6. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities

Community Outreach and Service

Publication of monthly online e-letter has continued.
- Featured sites in this period have been:
- - Embry Riddle Aeronautical University
  - Rutgers University
- Initiated a new series that will highlight specific data streams detailing the contents of each stream and its history. Five have been highlighted so far:
  - USPLN
  - CONDUIT
  - IDS/DDSPLUS
  - FNMOC
  - GEM
News Items published to the Unidata Home Page:
- Farewell to a dear friend
- Transition to AWIPS-II
- Using Operational and Experimental Observations in Education
- Update: AWIPS II Software Release
Unidata Seminar Series. Three seminars, have been presented since the spring governing committee meetings
- An Update on the NOAA Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) presented by Patricia A. Miller and Michael F. Barth, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory/Global Systems Division
- The challenges of the ECMWF graphics packages, Sylvie Lamy-Thepaut, ECMWF
- The Unidata Outreach Activities with a Focus on International Standards Related to Atmospheric Data Access, Ben Domenico, Unidata Program Center
Unidata seminars are webcast live, and archived for future viewing by community members.
Participated in and/or organized the following meetings:
- Unidata's 25th Anniversary Event planning and organizing (worked jointly with Admin staff)
- 2009 Unidata Training Workshop
- 2009 Triennial Users Workshop, "Using Operational & Experimental Observations in Geoscience Education" (worked jointly with Admin staff and Unidata Users Committee)
- 2009 AMS Summer Community Meeting, had a dual theme; "Observing Weather from the Ground Up - A National Network of Networks" and Renewable Energy. It was held at National Weather Center, Norman, Oklahoma
- 2009 Using Data in the Classroom Workshop
- 2009 UCAR Undergraduate Leadership Workshop
- Presented at the Tribal College's at NCAR meeting to help prepare climate change curriculum.

Data Access and Distribution

IDD
- Maintain topology, fill new requests
- Monitor status and discuss needed upgrades
- Monitor 3rd party feeds (FNMOC, GEM, MADIS, NLDN, USPLN)
  - The Unidata Program Center has been granted permission from BOTH FNMOC and the CMC to deliver their model output directly to our community. FNMOC provides the COAMPS and NOGAPS model output and the CMC provides the GEM model output. Unidata has provided access to these data for the past 8 years, but on a "point-to-point" basis. This has led to delays for set up and undue hardship and resource use at both FNMOC and the CMC. To help insure we continue to get this data via the LDM-IDD we pursued the option of allowing the UPC to fan out these data and asking the CMC and FNMOC to solely feed the UPC. This took a small amount of convincing, but we gained success over the summer to fan out the model output from both centers to our community. This has made access to these models output easier and more efficient.
Support
- Answer IDD, datatstream, miscellaneous, and assorted other support requests
Data
- Maintain data pages
- Meeting with COSMIC to provide easier data delivery of COSMIC data to the Unidata community
Community
- E&O: Continued activities (presentations, science fair judging) at local schools
- Web pages maintenance
- PV2 and related activities
- Provide domain expertise to staff
- Collaborated with Jen Oxelson regarding metrics statistics and global map of sites