Community Newsletter
Volume I, Number 7, November/December 2004

AGU Edition

Contents

Software Updates

Unidata's Community: An Introduction

Unidata facilitates data access, provides tools, supports faculty and staff, and advocates for its community on data-related issues. In its 20-some year history Unidata has built a solid core community of mostly atmospheric scientists; but to address some of the social and scientific issues facing the Earth sciences, it has, for the past three or four years sought to expand its scope to embrace a more diverse community to include oceanographers, hydrologists, and emergency or land managers. Discussions about the usefulness of Unidata's tools and data for researchers and educators outside of the core community have been underway for some time; but only recently have concrete steps been taken. Complex challenges about data delivery, data types, and tool modification are already under investigation in collaborative research efforts in this expanded community.

For those unfamiliar with Unidata and its tools and services, we invite you to explore the Unidata web at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/. There you will find information about available data types and tools as well as many other facets of the Unidata endeavor. If your curiosity is piqued after viewing these web sites, we invite you to contact info@unidata.ucar.edu or support@unidata.ucar.edu or to download software that interests you and test drive it. (NOTE: all software and data are provided free of charge to educational institutions. Registration to the web portal by completing a short form available under the "create an account link" on the home page provides download access.)

Unidata at the AGU Fall Meeting

In collaboration with government and academic co-convenors, Unidata is conducting a session at the AGU Fall Meeting. Its title "Cyberinfrastructure for Earth Systems Science," accurately describes the session's goal of exploring the need for interoperable data systems that support the Earth systems approach to issues cutting across the traditional sub-disciplines of the geosciences as well as including societal impacts (i.e., atmospheric, oceanographic, hydrologic, and solid Earth). See: schedule.

Two New and Noteworthy Collaborations

The University of Iowa, Princeton University, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and Unidata

The NEXRAD-ITR hydro project received funding from the National Science Foundation earlier this fall. The project aims to provide ready access to NEXRAD archives as well as the real-time information collected by NEXRAD weather radars to a broad community of users.

Use of the full resolution of NEXRAD information, especially in hydrology and hydrometeorology, is limited at this time because considerable expertise is required in weather radar, data quality control, formatting, and radar-rainfall algorithms. (Currently, the NEXRAD data are converted to operational products and used by forecasters in real time and then archived at NCDC.) Entire article.

The UNAVCO/GEON Cyberinfrastructure Developments in the Earth Sciences

UNAVCO, as part of the GEON project, is modifying a version of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) software to meet Earth Science-specific visualization needs. The IDV image (left) shows a clear correlation between areas of high strain rate at tectonic plate boundaries (Kreemer and others, 2003) and low S-wave velocity anomalies in the upper mantle under W. North America and the east Pacific rise (Shapiro and Ritzwoller, 2002).

The collaboration required to reach a point where an image such as the one shown at the left could be realized is an example of an end-to-end solution that begins with: data/models -> NetCDF -> OPeNDAP server -> Visualization & Collaboration (developed by Unidata using University of Wisconsin VisAD).

UNAVCO/GEON (GEOsciences Network; http://www.geongrid.org/), an NSF-funded Large-Scale Information Technology Research (ITR) project, founded to address some of those issues, is developing a distributed, services-based system that enables earth scientists to publish, share, integrate, analyze, and visualize their data. (The LEAD [Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery] http://lead.ou.edu/) is pursuing similar goals for the atmospheric community.) Entire article.

Software and Support Updates

GEMPAK.GEMPAK / N-AWIPS 5.7.4 released 12/02/2004. Important new features include: Ability to display QuikSCAT winds from NOAAPORT BUFR data; Dcgrib2 decoder enhancements for additional GRIB2 products; All GD programs have been enhanced to use lat/lon points from NMAP cursor point files (CPFs); NWX tables and LDM pqact.conf entries for text bulletins have been updated as necessary for NWS Communication Identifier (CID) End State Transition (users of old distributions will have to update NWX and pqact.conf entries to keep pace with NWS broadcast changes of WMO and PIL identifiers).
IDV. Jeff McWhirter is in Antigua with the RICO (Rain in Cumulus Over the Ocean) field project to set up the IDV as an alternative to Zebra for the project. (Don Murray will be on site in January.) Some RICO-specific custom displays and choosers have been added to the IDV, and IDV users who are RICO participants will be using the package to display aircraft trajectories, dropsonde data, and SPOL data among others.
LEAD. LEAD developers are currently working to define the LEAD metadata language and the details of the LEAD architecture. Through the heroic efforts of LEAD developers (especially those at Indiana University), the SC2004 demo went off without a hitch. Three distributed test bed machines (University of Alabama Huntsville, IU, and the University of Oklahoma) worked together to execute a user defined workflow--decoding, cataloging, and visualizing a data product.
McIDAS. Researchers (T H Achtor, T M Whittaker, D A Santek) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will make a presentation at the AGU called: "The next generation of McIDAS: A look toward the future". Even though McIDAS has served the community well for the past thirty years, new sensors being developed for future operational satellites will exceed the design of the current data structures and the visualization capabilities of the package. A plan has been developed within SSEC to explore the transition of the current McIDAS-X into a VisAD-based system to be known as McIDAS-V.
NetCDF: As part of the Unidata Seminar Series John Caron presented a talk on the implementation of a "Common Data Model" (CDM), a merger of the netCDF, OPeNDAP and HDF5 data models. The talk explained the CDM and overviewed the netCDF-Java version 2.2 architecture, including the use of NcML and THREDDS to annotate and modify datasets. The talk was webcast live, and an archived version of the talk will be made available at a later date.
Support. Unidata's support group is always on the lookout for more effective ways to serve the growing community. To help achieve our goal of better serving the community a Support Task Force (headed by Tom Yoksas) is researching a variety of "helpdesk systems".

Contact: support@unidata.ucar.edu for assistance with your software questions or subscribe to an e-mail list to learn more about the software packages that you use or those you would like to learn more about.

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