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2005 was the most competitive year yet for community equipment awards. Unidata received twenty-four proposals totaling $465,000 against an award budget of $100,000. The six panelists (two from Unidata and four from the community) met in April and chose to partially fund seven of the twenty-four proposals, using every last dime of the $100,000 pool.
Iowa State University: Increasing GIS Web Services Capacity to Serve the Unidata Community. As indicated by the proposal’s title, this effort was funded to increase the capacity and expand the GIS data services available for delivery to the Unidata community. PI Daryl Herzmann, Co-PI William Gallus.
Louisiana State University: IDD Community Infrastructure Enhancement at LSU. This effort was funded to continue service as a top tier IDD node, to serve Level II NEXRAD data, to archive raw streams of IDD and NOAAport data, and to serve as an off-site backup for five Regional Climate Centers in the event of ingest failures. PI Kevin Robbins.
Pennsylvania State University: Transition of Unidata IDD Relay Service to a 64-Bit Architecture. Penn. State was funded to upgrade its second-level relay node, allowing it to continue serving IDD NEXRAD Level II data to a number of Unidata sites. PI Dr. Charles Pavloski, Co-PIs Dr. William Brune and Dr. George Young.
University of Hawaii at Manoa: VisionLab 2005. Funding was provided to help the University upgrade its VisionLab. The University provided significant matching funds to realize the goals for the lab which will impact many students in the University’s Department of Meteorology. PI Dr. Steven Businger.
University of Missouri-Kansas City: Enhancing Meteorological Education and Climate Research, and K-12 Educational Outreach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The UMKC will use its award money in concert with funding the department to upgrade laboratory computers and acquire a high capacity server to perform data ingest functions. This will allow the UMKC to significantly enhance its course offerings, make better use of Unidata technologies, and help to better support data distribution within the community. PI Dr. Jimmy Adegoke.
Purdue University: Equipment to Enhance the Capacity to Process and Disseminate Value-added Weather Data at PurdueUniversity. This effort was funded to make more effective use of data within the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and to make data available to pre-collegiate institutions. PI Robert Trapp, Co-PI Matthew Huber.
Western Illinois University: New Establishment of Unidata Site for Meteorological Education. This effort will help bring a relatively new group on-line as well as make local radar data available via the IDD. This group will make data available to other Western Illinois communities and will therefore have a significant regional impact. PI Jongnam Choi.
Funding for these projects ranged from $4,000 to $19,000. All of the requests came in between $5,000 and $25,000. Many were trimmed back to eliminate what the panel felt were unnecessary expenses and to ensure that as many proposals as possible were funded. That’s tough with such a small budget and so much demand.
So what is the panel really looking for? In the distant past this program was administered by NSF with a fairly clear goal of expanding the Unidata community. In those days hardware was expensive and Unidata tools required expensive hardware. That is no longer the case. All of our software can run on Linux or Windows and most university departments can afford at least a few machines. While expansion clearly remains a goal of the program, just as important, if not more so, is how the award will help to increase the community capability. Most of the 2005 awards were distinguished in that way. You can reach the full RFP with all of the criteria on our website.
To see how past awardees have used their funding to better their programs as well as the community capability, please visit our equipment award home page. Articles for the current set of awards will post within the next year, as these new systems come on line.
If you have questions or suggestions about the Community Equipment Awards, please write to support@unidata.ucar.edu.
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