Members Attending:
Tom Whittaker, Univ of Wisc-Madison-Space Science & Engineering Center, Chair
Martin Baxter, Central Michigan Univ
Anne T. Case-Hanks, Univ of Louisiana, Monroe
Jennifer Collins, Univ of South Florida
Gerry Creager, Texas A&M
Steven Lazarus, Florida Institute of Technology
Kevin Tyle, Univ of Albany
Bart Geerts, Univ of Wyoming
Student Rep:
Stefan Cecelski, Univ of Maryland
NCEP Reps:
Becky Cosgrove (CONDUIT) - virtual participation
Michelle Mainelli (GEMPAK-NAWIPS/AWIPS II)
DeSouza Award Recipient:
David Knight, Univ of Albany
USGS Rep:
Richard Signell
Staff Attending:
| Tina Campbell
John Caron Julien Chastang Ethan Davis Doug Dirks Ben Domenico Steve Emmerson Ginger Emery Ward Fisher Dennis Heimbigner |
Marcos Hermida
|
The next Users Committee meeting will be 4-5 October 2012. It was suggested that it be a joint meeting with the Policy Committee. Date Amendment: The Users Committee will meet in Boulder, Colorado on September 17-18, with the 18th being the joint meeting day with the Policy Committee)
There were two actions from the previous meeting:
ACTION: TomWhittaker will send an invitation to the Unidata community to submit DeSouza nominations in the December timeframe - Done
ACTION: The UserComm will talk with community members about their data needs and the impending CONDUIT survey when they are contacting them for their site surveys - Done
Set up a WRF sub committee-Gary Lackmann, Brian Colle et al. Unidata will have a two-hour session at the next WRF meeting. The UPC also did a talk at the VAPOR session during AMS
Improved communications and interactions with MMM are still needed.
Highlights Include:
Two new software engineers, Marcos Hermida, who is working on THREDDS and Ward Fisher, who is working on netCDF support for Windows platforms. UPC continues to search for a Systems Administrator and a NOAA-funded software engineer to work on the OPeNDAP-Unidata collaborative project (OPULS). A summer Code intern is also being sought.
The Russell L. DeSouza Award is being presented at this meeting to David Knight, who has been active in the Unidata community for many years via governing committees, workshops, and helping universities gain access to real-time NLDN lightning data.
Dr. Thomas Bogdan took over as President of UCAR in January 2012.
Work is progressing to create an action/implementation plan associated with the Strategic Plan. The plan was formally adopted by the Policy Committee in early January. The plans will become the basis of the next proposal to be submitted in early 2013.
Staff allocation by project is nearing desired levels.
Real-time data flows are feeding about 500 machines at 230 sites running LDM-6. UPC's IDD cluster relays about 650 downstream connections with the average output of 9.3 TB/day.
There is 55.4 TBytes of data per year brought in via ADDE/OPeNDAP. Motherlode handles this data and maintains about a two week rollover, but UPC is not an archive site.
Software development infrastructure is being upgraded. The source code for various projects (CDM/TDS/IDV/LDM, with VISAD planned) is moving to Github. Development teams are moving towards using more community and collaboration features of Jira, Redmine. Development teams are starting to implement Agile development processes ("sprints").
During the WRF workshop session, IDV played a prominent role. Closer ties to WRF are warranted and from a poll of WRF users: IDV, VAPOR, NCL are the top 3 visualization tools.
IDV 3.0u2 was released in February. The IDV developers are working on time syncing, axis scale/labeling interface, enhanced support for ensemble output. The IDV has been moved to Github as fully open source. IDV and McIDAS-V teams are working collaboratively between the two projects.
No major changes to NAWIPS/GEMPAK or McIDAS-X
AWIPS II (D2D, NSHARP, GFE) A 64 bit EDEX server will be available winter 2012-13. Several UPC staff had a field trip to the local WFO at the Skagg's Bldg. They are conducting side-by-side demonstrations between AWIPS I and AWIPS II to measure performance and functionality.
There are now over 40,000 users in 200 countries in 2400 academic institutions in the Unidata community.
EarthCube: 111 white papers were submitted and 10 awards were granted. See: http://earthcube.ning.com/ Unidata is involved in some of the projects, but not the lead on any of them. (see presentation for additional details)
Yuan Ho and Tom Yoksas conducted a two-day workshop at California University of Pennsylvania on 16-17 February. The workshop funding was provided by CUP.
The Africa Meningitis Project is now a 3-year Google.org funded project under a UCAR Africa Initiative. The IDV is being used to generate displays using the TIGGE ensemble data from ECMWF. (Check out the slide 24 for more information)
Unidata had many visitors at both the AMS Student Conference and the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans. A great deal of interest was demonstrated in AWIPS II and IDV. UPC staff were joined by NCEP folks to demonstrate the capabilities of AWIPS II.
Community Equipment Awards: Unidata has made 61 awards in past 9 years, totaling approximately $1million. A small number of proposals were received this year to compete for the community award funding. We hope to see more in the future.
Highlights Include:
64-bit news:
Updated migration schedule:
GEMPAK news:
Performance:
NCEP still notes performance issues with model data. These are being worked on
and should be resolved before release in spring 2013.
Training:
NCEP will be producing webinars; these can be made available to University
community. Raytheon has provided admin documentation (1400+ pages), Michael
has been distilling into a smaller set of admin instructions for Unidata
community.
Michelle also described some "extended" projects, including thin-client software and collaboration tools.
Michael discussed options for Unidata release of AWIPS II, including timing and options for what to include in the release. There are concerns about releasing a package that is not completely functional, but Scott Jacobs (NCEP, on the phone) suggested there are nuances of functionality to be considered.
Bottom line: NCP is expected to be "mostly" complete by the projected time for release to Unidata community (Spring 2013). D2D is "mostly" complete now. Even if not all GEMPAK work is done by release time, AWIPS II should be in reasonable shape for Unidata community.
Support: Mohan notes that Unidata never envisioned providing support for anything other than the NCP. What would it mean to release a package that includes D2D as well? What will the support costs to Unidata be?
Lunch Break
David Knight (University at Albany, SUNY) was presented with the Russell L. DeSouza awarded for outstanding community service. David's presentation was titled "Collaboration, Cooperation, and Community."
A video of David's talk is available on the Seminar Series page.
Rich Signell gave a brief demonstration of the iPython notebook, which runs in a web browser and talks to a server running a Python interpreter. Great possibilities for interactive visualization through a thin client (browser). See iphython.org
Rich later pointed out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaS4NXxL5Qc.
Committee members had read the staff status reports before the meeting. There were few requests for clarification
Becky Cosgrove (via telephone) described changes to the CONDUIT data stream. Several models have received upgrades.
The change from RUC to RAP model output is now scheduled for 1 May 2012.
While some similar products exist in both CONDUIT and NOAAPort, there is no exact duplication of products.
NCEP will be updating CONDUIT servers after move to new building; additions to the CONDUIT feed can be implemented after the upgrade.
CONDUIT user survey:
John described a problem in the current CDM implementation that results in problems with netCDF variable names generated from GRIB files. He also provided some context on the various problems with GRIB tables, and referred to his paper on the subject. (See also other related writings on John's home page.)
To fix the existing problem, at least some variable names must change. (That is, when the next release of the CDM reads a GRIB file, one or more variable names created from the data in the GRIB file may be different than they were with the previous CDM release.) This will cause some IDV bundles to break, and also cause problems with existing TDS URL's, as well as other potential issues.
All solutions to the problem involve breaking something. John outlined some possible courses of action:
Committee opinion was strong that (1) human-friendly variable names are desirable, and (2) a small amount of ongoing pain from name changes is "the nature of the web," and should be expected. Committee agreed to think the issue over and revisit tomorrow.
Transportation for Wednesday is an issue, so dinner will be on Thursday evening.
Bus transportation still needs to be
confirmed between hotels and Mesa lab each day, including after the reception on Monday and the dinner on Thursday. Ginger Emery is working on this issue. A hike on the Walter Orr Roberts Trail will be planned during one of the breaks.
The reception on Monday late afternoon will provide an opportunity for participants to display and present posters. The students are encouraged to create posters, in particular, but any participant can present a poster. The registration asks if the participant is going to present a poster.
The student applications will be judged by the workshop subcommittee. The due date for submission is 18 May 2012.
The question of laptops and what software is needed was discussed. The speakers need to be contacted to obtain this information.
The planning committee took a field trip to the Mesa Lab. Tina Campbell showed them the rooms available for the workshop, and they decided that the Chapman room is too small, so that one would be eliminated from the program. Everybody was pleased with the Damon Room and the Main Seminar Room. The Damon will work out fine for the reception/poster session, and the Main Seminar Room will be great for the plenary and half of the break out sessions.
Following the workshop, Jennifer Collins and Kevin Tyle will share the lead to produce the BAMS article.
The Users Committee will meet a day prior to the workshop to get things coordinated and organized.
Python lets you use so many things-Python notebook netcdf 4
Server side processing-use python.
Bridging connection between Jython and Python.
IDV in classroom-add capability of 2 soundings on one-temp invection and isobars; create lines to be able to compare layers
Develop an ability within IDV to read non-height vertical coordinate data, such as model output redistributed in isentropic coordinates.
Skew-Ts in IDV- isobars, plotting two Skew-Ts on top of each other (like 0Z and 12Z), the ability of adding a box or line on top of the plotted skew-t...
data needs to be on a server
ability to plot multiple fields
More Jython, more emphasis on scripting for IDV
time-height probe
netCDF-several conventions (netCDF for WRF would be useful)
Training- WebEx classes for AWIPS II-need to record the sessions for review later
Gembud theme for a few sites who are early adopters - they in turn train the next wave
Weather lab taken away for awhile-IDV basics, hurricane models, wants to get the weather lab back to move forward
Re-focus IDV effort on the Collaboration tool (still available and functional as a plugin), so as to facilitate interactive research/operational map discussions. Hope to explore this tool beginning this fall between UWisc-Madison and UAlbany, and provide feedback to the IDV developers.
Develop an ability within IDV to read non-height vertical coordinate data, such as model output redistributed in isentropic coordinates.
Cloud computing-HTML5-converging on a standard flash, GPU's 3-D , world
is full of
exciting opportunities using the cloud
Thin client-Java script competitions-keep doors and minds open in the cloud world.
Question of moving Java based desktop to HTML5
How much work is done on the client and how much on the server
AWIPS II thin client- Michelle-where is processing being done for thin client?
netCDF driver-plug in for awips2
Unidata would have to host a repository for AWIPS II - needs a lot of discussion
Server (all the work/processing done on local machine)
vs Client doing it and then pushing out the end product (e.g., image generation)
It should be possible to create a virtual machine environment populated with Unidata software packages that people could download and run with little or no configuration.
This might be useful in environments where expertise to install/configure different operating systems is limited. Some expertise in the environments represented by the virtual machines would be required, but maybe less than needed to actually configure hardware etc.
Questions:
Tom, Mike, Robb are interested in pursuing this.
ACTION: Tom, Mike and Robb should create prototype VM distribution for evaluation by
committee members and others.
Workshop to be open to undergraduates as well as graduate students
ACTION: Update workshop student announcement to include undergraduates and graduate students; add speakers to speaker list; update web pages; publicize.
The committee recognizes the tension between making GRIB variable names human readable vs keeping them stable, in the face of changing external GRIB parameter tables. The committee also recognize that the netCDF-Java library needs to fix incorrectly named GRIB variables. With that in mind, the committee recomends that:
The committee also agreed that Unidata should advocate for changes to processes
used by the GRIB community (creating a registry of GRIB tables, for example),
specifically by making recommendations to the WMO committee that oversees the
GRIB format. Michelle Mainelli offered to have her colleague Jeff Ator, who is
NCEP's representative to the IPET-DRC (Inter-Programme Expert Team on Data
Representation and Codes), present Unidata's recommendations at the next team
meeting in May 2012.
ACTION: John to draft a course of action for CDM 4.3 and circulate to
committees.
ACTION: Ethan and John to draft recommentations for the WMO.