[ldm-users] NCEP/NCO comments on LDM replacement

[Jeff Ator]

Dear Steve,

Here at NCEP/NCO, we've been following with great interest the 
discussion thread and user responses related to your proposal to develop 
a replacement for the LDM.  While we understand that it's always 
important to look ahead and plan for the future, we nonetheless share 
the concerns of many of your other users.  We use the LDM extensively in 
our operational environment, and it has worked very well for us.  So 
while we recognize that there may be some aspects of the design that 
could be improved, we would be leery of a wholesale replacement for the 
existing system.  We have several other big issues coming up over the 
next couple of years, including moving to a new building as well as 
upgrading our central computer system, so we would strongly prefer to 
not also have to modify our entire data flow architecture for a new 
software package.  To the credit of you and the rest of the Unidata 
team, the LDM has been a very stable, reliable and dependable system for 
many years, so from our perspective we don't really see a need to do 
away with it.

Sincerely,
Jeff Ator and Scott Jacobs
NOAA National Weather Service
NCEP Central Operations
(301)-763-8000