PhotoHighlight photo by Dai, Yanping (CMA information Center) CMA Colloquium  Don Murray presents an overview of the Unidata Program   ThisIssue   • International Collaboration   • Metrics Assessment   • News Briefs   Past Issues     RSSFeed   • E-Letter via RSS     NewsLinks   • UCAR News   • NSF News     CommunityCorner   • Unidata Events   • Unidata Seminar Series   • Community Events   • Opportunities

For a program whose very existence began with a call from the atmospheric sciences community, Unidata is not new at the business of responding to calls from its community. Twenty-five years later as international boundaries thin and international problems multiply, Unidata's expertise is being sought by community members in diverse locales around the globe. Support to international users is not new, of course, and international collaboration has been a part of Unidata's portfolio for several years, but the fairly recent proliferation of requests is somewhat new. The descriptions below are simply thumbnails, and we will expand on them in future issues, but now we offer the following to highlight these most recent international collaborations:

Sahel Conference: Developer Tom Yoksas attended the conference as a representative of UCAR's Africa Initiative. The location was Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and the conference's stated goal was to take steps to make it possible to use weather data and forecasts to benefit populations in the Sahel, and at the same time, to strengthen cooperation among the National Meteorological and Hydrological Service (NMHS), universities, and regional centers. Tom's role was providing information in a series of presentations about UCAR's Office of Programs, and how those programs could contribute to achieving, not only conference goals, but long term support in data transfer, education, and infrastructure development. The image at right shows the signing of the MOU between NCAR and the government of Burkina Faso for the free exchange of data. In the hours leading up to the conference, Tom also used his not-inconsiderable computer know-how to set up equipment to be used in hands-on training sessions held on the final days of the conference. Tom returned with a message from Dr. Abdoulaye Ouedrago, a scientist at Ouagadougou University, who requests advice and assistance in setting up an atmospheric sciences program at the university. You may respond to Dr. Ouedrago directly, or e-mail Tom, who will then compile and forward the messages.

Collaborative Visit to Japan: A few weeks earlier netCDF developer Russ Rew responded to an invitation from Kyoto University colleague, Professor Masato Shiotani, to meet with him and others at the university. Russ met with members of GFD-Dennou, a Geophysical Fluid Dynamics interest group currently developing and making freely available Ruby-based software for accessing and visualizing GRIB, GrADS, and netCDF data. Dr. Takeshi Horinouchi is leading the Ruby developments, and introduced Gdfnavi, a new web-based tool to archive, share, distribute, analyze, and visualize geophysical fluid data and knowledge. Winding up the Kyoto visit Russ presented an overview of the Unidata program entitled "Invisible technologies for the geosciences: the importance of infrastructure." In Tokyo, Russ sat down with JMA Japanese Meteorological Agency members to discuss JMA technologies and later presented a talk about a Unidata perspective on improved infrastructure for scientific data as well as thoughts on the future of scientific data management. Finally, Russ travelled to Yokahama to visit JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for marine-Earth Science and Technology) and to repeat the earlier presentation first given at JMA. This last leg gave Russ the opportunity to exchange some ideas with Hadley Center scientists working on the TIGGE project.

CMA (Chinese Meteorological Administration): IDV developers Don Murray and Yuan Ho accepted an invitation from the Guang Dong Meteorology Bureau to demonstrate the IDV and THREDDS to its research division. While there, the developers successfully worked with the Chinese researchers to incorporate their research datasets into the IDV. In the following days, they met with representatives of the National Meteorological Information Center in Beijing where they provided an overview of Unidata tools and services (See Photo Highlight image.) They met with several people to fix some problems they were encountering while using the LDM to supply data for the TIGGE project.

EGU: For the second year running Unidata co-sponsored a Union program at the European Geophysical Union's spring meeting held in Vienna, Austria. The three conveners, Mohan, Stefano Nativi, and Mike Jackson co-chaired the program which took place in the ESSI (Earth and Space Science Informatics) session. Ten invited speakers participated. There are indications that interest in this topic is growing, and Mohan, together with Stefano Nativi and Bernd Ritschel will prepare a proposal to move this into its on stand-alone session.

Rutherton Appleton Laboratory: Staff members John Caron, Ethan Davis, and Ben Domenico were invited to Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) to meet with representatives from the British Atmospheric Data Center (BADC), the British Met Office, and experts in the ISO/OGC standards. The trip's purpose was to discuss harmonizing the data models used in CDM, CSML, and OGC/ISO. The participants agreed to work towards a common view within the framework of the OGC Abstract Feature types. The main conclusion for Unidata is that the Common Data Model (Scientific Data Types) should be formally associated with the ISO19123 coverage model. The CDM can then be serialized to netCDF-3, netCDF-4, NcML or GML Application Schema.

Viewed as an aggregate these visits serve to underscore Unidata's enhanced visibility in the international arena, a direction requested specifically by its governing committees and in line with NSF's goals, and also they deliver the message that Unidata's data delivery and software packages have the potential for universal applicability.