International Activities and Collaborations
Winter 2010/2011

International Activities

UPC International outreach activities remain largely unchanged since the last User Committee meeting in Fall, 2010.

• Unidata conducted a demo/hands-on session for the IDV and RAMADDA at the University of Vienna, Austria on April 7. This effort fulfilled a request by Vanda Grubiic, a past member of the Unidata Policy Committee (rotated off in 2010); current co-chair of the Atmospheric Science department at the University of Vienna; and future head of NCAR/EOL (position starts on July 1, 2011). This activity was possible due to separately funded Unidata staff participation in the European Geophysical Union (EGU) annual meeting that was held in Vienna on April 4-8.

• Unidata will conduct an LDM/IDV/RAMADDA/THREDDS hands-on session at the WRF in the Middle East training workshop that will be held in Cyprus on May 2 - May 8. Students will be lead through exercises that will demonstrate how freely-available Unidata tools can be used in support of local modeling and display/analysis activities.

• A variety of groups in UCAR, including Unidata, actively sought and were awarded funding from Google.org for support of the development of a prototype Earth Gauging System in Africa. Initial activities in this effort have been aimed at numerical weather forecasting in support of meningitis epidemic management in northern Ghana. Unidata's role is centered on application of its technologies in support of research and data accumulation and dissemination efforts. Unidata software packages that are/will be prominently featured in this effort are the LDM/IDD, IDV, RAMADDA, THREDDS, and the ADDE component of McIDAS-X.
• Unidata hosted Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) sessions at the EUMETSAT 2010 Users Conference held in Cordoba, Spain in September, 2010. Tom Yoksas was the Scientific Programme Committee representative for ESSI for this meeting.

  This invited section (invited by Volker Gaertner, PI for the meeting and Head of Training in EUMETSAT) was successful enough (approx. 50 audience members in all sessions) that EUMETSAT wants to include the section in the program for its 2011 Users Conference that will be held in Oslo, Norway in September, 2011.

• Unidata hosted two Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) sessions at the AGU 2010 Joint Assembly in Iguassu Falls, Brazil in August, 2010. It also conducted a one day short course on Data Access, Use and Sharing on the Sunday immediately before the meeting.

  Tom Yoksas was the ESSI Program Committee representative for the meeting and proposed, designed, and led the short course along with colleagues from INPE/CPTEC in Brazil (Waldenio Gambi de Almeida), the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal (Guilherme Chagas), and CICESE in Baja, Mexico (Luis Farfan).

  The short course was a logical follow-up to the Latin American Data Workshop that was held on the Universidade de São Paulo campus in São Paulo, Brazil on August 21-23, 2008. It focused on availability and use of ESSI-related Unidata offerings: LDM/IDD, IDV, THREDDS, RAMADDA and also highlighted capabilities made available by NOAA/NCDC (NOMADS), INPE/CPTEC (BUFR package), and CICESE (Mexico, application of Unidata products in the forecast of Baja Mexico hurricanes).

• Data from UCAR GOES East/West/South ingest systems have been routinely accessed by international users in North, Central and South America using McIDAS-X, IDV, and McIDAS-V.

• Use of Unidata tools, especially netCDF and the IDV, continues to grow internationally
• IDD-Brazil continues to expand in Africa