Contents

• Introduction
• Committee News
• THREDDS Project
  • LDEO/IRI THREDDS Development
  • Program Center THREDDS Development
• Software Snapshots

Introduction

Welcome once again to the Unidata monthly online newsletter. Comments from you on the April issue were positive. Still, we think we may be able to do a better job in keeping you up-to-date on Program Center and community activity. So, once again we invite your comments both positive and negative.

Committee News

The Users Committee's Regional Workshop will be taking place as planned at Millersville University June 6-8. Its purpose is to provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), and to present use cases of IDV and other Unidata services (data and tools) in the classroom.

The Unidata Policy Committee met 24-25 May (last week) in Boulder. The committee welcomed new member Philip Bogden who is CEO at GoMOOS, a national pilot program designed to bring hourly oceanographic data from the Gulf of Maine. The data facilitates the work of several groups. Among them are coastal resource managers, search and rescue teams, emergency response teams, and public health officials. Phil joins committee members David Maidment (University of Texas-Austin) and Chair Designate, Melanie Wetzel, whose committee terms extend until summer 2007. Michael Goodman, the committee's new NASA representative was also welcomed to the meeting. Michael will be moving from National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville to NASA headquarters in Washington DC for a one-year tour beginning in July. The committee looks forward to his insights.

A call for nominations for new committee members for both the Users and Policy Committees from Policy Committee Chair, Melanie Wetzel will be sent to the community within the next several weeks. Members are appointed for three-year terms and should be able to attend semiannual meetings in Boulder. You will find a a brief description of the Users Committee Charge at this link.

Policy Committee members are appointed by the UCAR President, Rick Anthes, and serve three-year terms.

The THREDDS Project

THREDDS is a National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project funded by NSF EHR/DUE (Education and Human Resources/Division of Undergraduate Education). Briefly, THREDDS is a set of middleware technologies and a prototype system for cataloguing, browsing, and accessing remote, retrospective, and other data types. THREDDS is an enterprise whose developers collaborate across cyberspace from a wide variety of locations and institutions from the Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory (PMEL) to the University of Florence (Italy) to the Division of Climate and Oceans at Lamont-Doherty. To give readers an idea of the scope of the project, we'd like to introduce a THREDDS developer/collaborator at the latter site and a developer who's located within the Program Center.

Introducing a THREDDS Community Developer

THREDDS community developer Benno Blumenthal (left), whose home base is IRI, is a THREDDS data provider as well as a client/server developer. As a provider LDEO serves data from the IRI Climate Data Library which provides climate-related datasets that contain both model and climate data.

According to Blumenthal, "We are actually a group of servers--we use THREDDS and OpenDAP to make a single large collection appear while in fact different parts of the collection are maintained in different places." Each place displays the same catalog, but maintains originals only for a portion of it. The group also uses the protocols to include dataset collections that are maintained by other groups that use standard THREDDS/OPeNDAP software.

Benno continued: "Because our software is a THREDDS client, our users have much easier access to datasets maintained at other institutions within the THREDDS effort. This will, of course, become much more important as more data providers use THREDDS to describe their collections. We are continuing to work towards the goal of making it as practical to work with data hosted at other institutions as it is to copy it and use it locally."

Meet a Unidata Staff THREDDS Developer

Meet staff member Ethan Davis (right). His THREDDS effort is aimed at integrating the new catalog API that supports the 1.0 spec into the catalog generator and the DQC (Dataset Query Capabilities) server. When that work is complete, he will focus on integrating these two tools into the THREDDS servlet framework. What that will mean for THREDDS users is that there will be a single servlet distribution for all the THREDDS tools.

Ethan has been with the Program Center since 1996. Earlier assignments have included the COMET Case Studies Project and DODS/OPeNDAP. Since each of these projects involves access to remote data his experience with them has facilitated his work in helping to develop the THREDDS project.

Software Snapshots

• GEMPAK. GEMPAK 5.7.2 contains many updates to NMAP2 including improved map database selection, time interval and range selection, and the addition of a GUI for Advanced Objective Dvorak Technique. Additional changes include updates to several decoders, and algorithms for model precipitation accumulation time periods.
• IDV. IDV developers are gearing up for the Regional Workshop in Millersville June 6-8 which features the IDV. Its steering committee met and that group is currently testing 1.1 Beta 4 following its first meeting which took place via telephone conference call. A summary of that meeting is available.
• McIDAS. The SSEC McIDAS v2004 distribution was downloaded to the UPC as soon as it became available. The Unidata distribution is being built from this release now, and the hope is that it will be available for download as early as the end of the first week of July.
• netCDF Developers are working on release v. 3l6.9. After it has been thoroughly tested its release will be announced in the news section on the Unidata Home Page
• NLDM is the NNTP based LDM software. It is installed and running at seven sites around the country, relaying the CONDUIT, CRAFT, and HDS feeds. More feeds are being added and the network is being evaluated to determine if its performance and functionality offer improvements over the current LDM.