The
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences is the university component
of the Regional Meteorological Training Center (RMTC) of the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO) (Region III). It is responsible for the only graduate courses
on atmospheric and oceanographic sciences in
In January 2002 our RMTC was invited to take part in MeteoForum. We undertook to improve our infrastructure to be able to access meteorological information in real time and enter the Unidata community. In its 51 years of existence our organization has formed an important group of teachers at the international level and maintained up to date the theoretical graduate and post graduate training in the world priority research lines. This topical update should go together with an adequate technological infrastructure to provide real training for human resources with a view to future work in all fields (academic, basic and applied research, operative professional tasks, inter and multidisciplinary work, transfer and outreach). In 2003, the department received Unidata funds to improve its computer infrastructure, improving communications with an operationally quicker system. A whole network which worked at 10Mb/sec. with various HUBs in series was replaced by a 100 Mb/sec network and the HUBs were replaced with switches. New machines were incorporated for the computer room, increasing the number of computers available for students from 5 to 8. This has also resulted in more and better computers for research. The COMET MeteoForum project contributed through UCAR the necessary funds to acquire a datashow projector to be used in classes connected to Internet and to be able to develop educational modules during lessons, to work with real time meteorological events and any other digitally available data which could be useful in the classroom.
Our aim now is to make the LDM software operative and thus to be able to start processing a given amount of data and, what is more important, for our students to be able to learn how to do it. Together with the LDM, it is the intention of this center to make the students familiar with the use of analysis and display packages such as GEMPAK and McIDAS. To this end, a powerful PC with the Linux system was acquired with the Unidata funds which will function shortly as a server for our students to be able to use this software. The challenge is to learn to use and incorporate them in the graduate material so that the formation and training of our students is in accordance with the standards set in the last reports of the WMO.
Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences,
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Piso 2 – Pabellón 2 – Cdad. Universitaria
C1428EHA – Buenos Aires –ARGENTINA