Unidata launched V2 of its website on September 18th.

Not only did the site undergo a face lift, but significant enhancements were made to the architecture which will allow us to better achieve our mission: to provide a cohesive means for community members to participate in the Unidata community.

Part of our long-term vision is for the site to become the primary point of entry to the program center. Not only will users come to our site to gain access to software downloads and information about Unidata; they'll also use our site to gain better access to on-line support and to communicate within the broader community. We're also looking at ways to personalize users' experience with our site--making the experience as simple and relevant to their needs as possible.

Two high priority items are integrating mailing lists more tightly with our site and providing better on-line support (not at the exclusion of the great personal support you already receive, of course).

by Daryl Herzmann

The Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM) provides its diverse user community with a rich data set that facilitates research efforts, assists in decision-making processes, and beefs up science curricula in primary and secondary schools. The IEM combines data from many cooperating partners; thereby saving itself money by sidestepping the issue of deploying and maintaining its own sensors. Initiated and maintained under the umbrella of the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University, the IEM was developed to harness pre-existing observational resources in the state and to provide a fine-scale analysis of conditions.

The IEM uses Unidata's Internet Data Distribution to receive and disseminate many of its products. Primarily, developers convert data arriving on the IDD from less common formats to more accessible ones, since a large majority of the user base can't handle formats like NIDS, GRIB, and the flat text files provided by the NWS. For example, the IEM makes use of the Unidata-developed nex2img program that converts radar image data into a form that can be made available by a map server.

Interestingly, the query "what happened yesterday?" is more commonly asked than "what is happening now?" which may reflect the IEM's use by the research community as it addresses multi-disciplinary environmental topics. Ultimately, the research benefits the public as scientists try to understand the complete air/land/sea cycles. The IEM's collaborative nature leads naturally to collaborative research, since a large volume of diverse data makes it possible to produce interesting applications: one interesting example: a plot of surface pavement temperatures with air temperatures and RADAR.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are beginning to be widely used by the Earth-science community including many in Unidata's core community; and since the IEM contains many spatially-referenced datasets a move to integrate its data into GIS applications seemed natural. In fact, IEM developers have been moving in that direction for a number of months. To assist in achieving that goal, they submitted a proposal to the Unidata Equipment Award 2005 RFP and received funding that will be used to add infrastructure to support the addition of new datasets as well as the geographical expansion of the datasets with delivery geared for GIS platforms and users within Unidata. (See Equipment Awards news brief below.)

Data Stream Changes Radio Acoustic Sounding System (RASS) 6-minute data was added to the datastream in late August from NOAA/Forecast Systems Laboratory. See: http://www.profiler.noaa.gov/npn/aboutNpnProfilers.jsp. On October 1, the NEXRAD level III and GOES floater products were removed from the FNEXRAD and UNIWISC IDD feeds. Contact support@unidata.ucar.edu for more information.

Equipment Awards In the past month, Unidata's always-popular Equipment Awards project announced the 2005 award recipients. They are: Iowa State University, Louisiana State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Purdue University, and Western Illinois University. You can read more about the 2005 proposals here. Funding for these projects ranged from $4,000 to $19,000. A requirement to be fulfilled within a year of receipt of funding is producing an article that describes how funds were spent in support of the Unidata endeavor. Read about the 2004 award winners on the awards home page.

Community Announcements If you're interested in community job opportunities and events be sure to check the Community Corner section of the new web site. If you have something you'd like to post in either of the these sections, send a URL containing the information to opportunities@unidata.ucar.edu

Sports Update After missing the chance to acknowledge Unidata golfers's prowess last month, the CommunitE-letter staff take this opportunity to apologize and set the record straight. The mighty team snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to pick up a second-place slot on the leaderboard during UCAR's end-of-summer tournament. Maybe next year we'll be able to substitute "Win" in place of "Cheat" in the team captain's suggested headline: Champions Choose to Cheat for Charity.