AMS Edition

Contents

• Unidata at the Annual Meeting
• NOMADS: Got Models?
• TAMDAR Data

• Software Updates
  • GEMPAK
  • IDV
  • LEAD
  • NetCDF
  • Support

Unidata at the AMS Annual Meeting

Within a few days some Unidata staff members will hit the road to San Diego and the AMS Annual Meeting. We look forward to meeting with new community members as well as becoming reacquainted with old friends. We note times, authors, and talks or posters being presented by UPC staff and other sessions of interest at this link.

Plan to stop by the Unidata booth (number 416 and 515) where we will have demos of Unidata's visualization packages, and an informative slide show that describes Unidata's software and analysis tools. Staff will be available to help you remotely tune or configure your operating systems or packages. See you in San Diego.

NOMADS: Got Models?

To address a growing need for retrospective numerical weather prediction and global climate models, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), along with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), initiated the NOAA Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) project. NOMADS addresses model data access needs as outlined in the U.S. Weather Research Program (USWRP) Implementation Plan for Research in Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting and Data Assimilation to "redeem practical value of research findings and facilitate their transfer into operations." The NOMADS framework was also developed to facilitate model and observational data inter-comparison issues as discussed in documents such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 1990, 1995, 2001) and the U.S. National Assessment (2000). NOMADS is the first long-term digital Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) archive in the U.S. Read the entire article which was contributed to the E-letter by Glenn Rutledge (NCDC).

The image on the left was created by University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Nate Uhlenbrock using the Unidata IDV to display hourly RUC analyses retrieved from the NOMADS system. View a larger image and description.

TAMDAR Data Now Available

TAMDAR (Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Report) data come from a "turn-key" sensor package (as opposed to the aircraft's own weather sensors) which has its own communications (ORBCOM). TAMDAR data from the AirDat network operations center are hosted at NOAA's Forecast Systems Lab and made available in netCDF format. There will be more than 12,000 observations a day during the test period called the "Great Lakes Fleet Experiment" from 64 aircraft.The TAMDAR sensor suite includes temperature, winds, humidity, icing, and turbulence (eddy dissipation rate (EDR) algorithm) parameters.

You will find additional information on TAMDAR data on the FSL-MADIS web page. They are available for education and research (publications encouraged) through at least July 2005. Access to the data is provided through the MADIS aircraft data feed using point-to-point LDM technology, as well as Web based and FTP access. Other aircraft data (i.e. ACARS, AMDAR) are also available. If you are interested, sign up here.

Software and Support Updates

Contact: support@unidata.ucar.edu for assistance with your software or 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.

Send comments to info@unidata.ucar.edu.

Unidata is sponsored by the National Science Foundation