McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, GOES Ingest and NOAAPort Status Report
Summer/Fall 2009
Tom Yoksas
September 29, 2009
The group's work supports five 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
5. Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
6. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities
Overview
The use of McIDAS in the U.S. educational community remains largely
unchanged since the last Policy Committee meeting in Spring 2009.
- Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009 was made available on July
10, 2009. The UPC continues to make bugfix and enhancement
upgrades available through an addendum process. Unidata
McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009 was an addendum upgrade to v2008.
- The UPC continues to receive sporadic requests for
McIDAS from international university users and U.S. government agencies
and other non-traditional Unidata users (e.g., private businesses, etc.).
Government agencies and non-traditional Unidata users are referred to
UW/SSEC for access to McIDAS; international educational community
user requests are granted on a case-by-case basis after they
provide a clear statement of their acceptance of the terms of use
provided by SSEC.
- The UPC (Yoksas) actively participates in the McIDAS
Advisory Committee (MAC). The MAC was assembled by UW/SSEC to advise
SSEC on McIDAS-X users needs/concerns/desires for development in the
next generation McIDAS, McIDAS-V.
- ldm-mcidas v2008 included support
for USPLN lightning data and is available as source code and
as binary releases for select platforms.
- Unidata-ingested GOES-10 imager data was integrated in
Unidata-Wisconsin GOES-East composite image sectors beginning January 31, 2007.
Direct, programmatic access to real-time GOES-10 data via McIDAS ADDE
spurred use by over 450 users in 33 countries who downloaded an average of
615 GB of data per month. Notably, over 1 TB of data was downloaded per month
during the 2008/9 South American tropical wet season by a wide variety of users
including NCAR/EOL for support of the Variability of American Monsoon Systems
Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study Regional Experiment.
NB: GOES-10 is currently scheduled for decommissioning on December 1, 2009.
Unidata has drafted a letter urging NOAA/NESDIS to consider repurposing
one of the existing operational GOES platforms (e.g., GOES-12) for
South American surveillance as soon as feasible after GOES-10's decommissioning.
- Unidata NOAAPort ingest package continues to provide
NOAAPort content in the IDD's HDS, IDS|DDPLUS, NGRID, NIMAGE, and NEXRAD3 feeds.
The package is know to be used by 16 sites, but the number is undoubtedly
higher since SSEC makes the package available to its McIDAS-XCD users.
Updated: April 4, 2011
by Tom Yoksas.