Unidata

by Steven Businger, University of Hawaii

With funds from the Unidata Equipment Award Program and a generous cost match from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), the Meteorology Department at the University of Hawaii has undertaken a significant upgrade of its VisionLab computer facility. The upgrade comprises ten new Apple Power Mac G5 (8 Dual and 2 Quad) workstations equipped with 23” Cinema High-Definition Displays. These new workstations replace an aging set of UNIX workstations in varying stages of disrepair. The new Macs are linked to a high-resolution Sony video projector for lecture presentations and weather briefings.

SOEST's computer network provides high-speed connections and data transfer capabilities. It connects to the UH Manoa campus FDDI campus backbone network, and through that to PACOM wide-area network services, which link Hawaii directly with the Far East and the U.S. mainland. Network switches in the Hawaii Institute for Geophysics building (HIG) that houses VisionLab have recently been upgraded to one GB capacity. The new hardware has allowed us to take advantage of the enhanced SOEST network bandwidth.

A significant advantage of the Macintosh operating system architecture is its unique flexibility. Mac OS X is a UNIX-based operating system that allows the Unidata software set to be available in the lab (e.g., GEMPAK and the IDV), while at the same time the usual PC software sets are also available to students and faculty providing desktop publishing functionality (e.g., Apple iWorks, Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, etc.). Thus, as the instructor for the synoptic lab class, I can load a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation for the day’s lecture followed by student-led weather briefings presented using imagery and animations produced by the IDV, McIDAS, and GEMPAK, with underlying data driven by an LDM data feed. The Mac workstations allow for easy online software upgrades and have a relatively low exposure to disruptive viruses which reduces administrative overhead.

During non-class periods the Power Macs are used for research. The Mac platform is well suited to the desktop publishing tasks that characterize the production of research papers and student dissertations. A primary research objective of VisionLab is to mitigate the impact of natural hazards on society and industry through improvements in our ability to observe and predict the evolution of these events over the central and eastern North Pacific Ocean. The updated VisionLab allows a number of data streams and products not routinely available through Unidata to be accessed and archived for research and educational purposes (see Table 1). Both the MM5 and the new WRF model have been ported to the Mac platform. Among our research projects is an effort to assimilate long-range lightning data over the data-sparse Pacific into these models.

In summary, the UH VisionLab has undergone a major renovation promoted by the funds received from the Unidata Equipment Award Program. VisionLab capitalizes on state-of-the-art Unidata software and the real-time datastream from Unidata to foster a resurgence of geophysical data in the Meteorology Program at the University of Hawaii. The author of this note will be pleased to share with the Unidata community his experiences in using Apple hardware.

WMO's THORPEX (THe Observing system Research and Predictability EXperiment) global program was conceived and initiated to respond to 21st century challenges of accelerating the accuracy of one-day to two-week weather forecasts to achieve social, economic, and environmental benefits.

TIGGE, (THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble) is a key component of the program--a framework for central access for the complete set forecast ensembles that will be combined into a single ensemble system. NCAR, in collaboration with ECMWF and the Chinese Meteorological Agency (CMA), is seeking to establish identical international data repositories for the TIGGE data which will be output from the THORPEX. Data from the project needs to be received and archived and accessible to ensemble forecasts from possibly nine international numerical weather prediction centers. The data have to be quickly available through a portal and secure long-term archives and services need to be implemented. NCAR SCD will be one of the long-term archives. Unidata's Local Data Manager will be used to enable the global data receipts to build the TIGGE archives and probably will be used to fulfill subscription data requests.

With this as a stimulus, the UPC engaged in an evaluation of the LDM-6 for TIGGE data collection and relay testing. TIGGE data must be able to be transferred bi-directionally with 12 hours between the three data archive centers. By comparison, the target TIGGE volume is seven times the amount of data flowing on average in IDD CONDUIT.

The Unidata LDM demonstrated that it was capable of sending approximately 17 GB/hr from ECMWF to NCAR/SCD (graph linked at right).

While the TIGGE data relay tests revealed some LDM-6 deficiencies, they have been solved in the latest distributions (LDM-6.4.4+), and through some needed system TCP tuning:

• The real time statistics reporting utility, rtstats, was unable to report volumes greater than 2 GB for individual feeds. Reporting has been upgraded to report whatever volume of data is transferred in any feed.
• The LDM was upgraded to remove failures when two or more pqact processes try to create a new output directory concurrently. This situation can occur when two or more pqact invocations try to create the same output directory when processing FILE actions.
• pqinsert was enhanced to return appropriate exit status upon queue insertion failure
• Latencies for data received on the NCAR/SCD-maintained relay node (Sun Solaris SPARC 8 processor server with 32 GB RAM) dropped from close to one hour to seconds after increasing TCP buffer sizes from default values to 225 KB (graph linked at right)

Given the excellent results of the TIGGE tests, we are confident that LDM-6 has the ability to relay all anticipated data volumes in the THORPEX program.

by Tom Yoksas, Unidata Program Center

Unidata Transitions to a New Inquiry Tracking System

Unidata staff are moving software support to a new inquiry tracking system, and we need your help to ease the transition process.

For the past decade and a half, we asked you to submit your questions and comments to our general User Support inbox, support@unidata.ucar.edu. Upon receipt of a new inquiry, a Unidata staff member would read your message and decide which staff member would be best able to answer the question(s) it contained. Though this process has worked well, it requires a varying amount of time by more than one staff member. As the Unidata community has expanded over the years, the amount of time staff spent doing the routine task of inquiry classification has increased to the point where that effort has begun to affect the time available for responding to inquiries.

The new inquiry tracking (helpdesk) system that we are now testing moves the classification of questions to you, the user. We will be better able to respond to inquiries on distinct topics if your questions are organized into emails specific to particular topics. For instance, if you are setting up a new system and have concerns on LDM, GEMPAK, IDV, and decoder installation, it will help us if you send in separate emails for these topics: one for LDM, another for GEMPAK, another for the IDV, and another for decoders.

E-mail address aliases related to the various packages/topics we support have been created so that your topic-specific questions can be processed with a minimum of effort. Examples of the email addresses that are supported are:

1. support-ldm@unidata.ucar.edu—inquiries specific to LDM installation, configuration, and use
2. support-idd@unidata.ucar.edu—inquiries specific to IDD issues like upstream feed sites
3. gempak@unidata.ucar.edu—inquiries specific to the installation, configuration and use of Unidata GEMPAK
4. support-idv@unidata.ucar.edu—inquiries specific to the installation, configuration, and use of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) etc.

E-mails addressed to the topic-specific addresses will be routed to our new inquiry tracking system which will automatically return an acknowledgement of the inquiry's receipt.

Since we know that you have no apriori way of knowing what the list of possible topics is, any email sent to the generic support address, support@unidata.ucar.edu, will also work—just not as fast. The list of topic-specific email addresses that we support can be found here. Please note that the contents of this page will change in time as new support topics are identified and unused ones are sunset. One of our next steps is to implement web-based inquiry submission in which you can select your topic with one easy click.

As we gain experience in using the new tracking system and as it becomes fully integrated with our website, additional self-help services will become available. One example of something to look forward to is a web-based, inquiry submission interface that will automatically search knowledge base while the the inquiry is being entered and informs the end user of articles that may be sufficient to answer the current question(s). Another feature will be the ability of the user to review the list of inquiries that s/he has submitted and close those that have been solved; reopen those that still present problems, and add information to those that are awaiting response.

We expect that the new inquiry tracking system will not only improve our service to you, but will provide the efficiency needed to allow us to spend more effort on producing improved software tools for you.

Student Visit Twenty high school students from the Colorado Springs School were visitors at Unidata on March 1. They came here to learn about hurricanes. The visit, organized by UCAR Education and Outreach, the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment, and Unidata featured a full day of information about hurricanes. Their origins, evolution, and especially their effects were explained by staff member, Jeff Weber. Interest in the topic was generated by the students' need to be informed as they head out to Mississippi and Louisiana to help in rebuilding and relief efforts. The UPC was pleased to be a player in the process.

CONDUIT Do you have an opinion? High-resolution model data can be at your finger tips. The data is not available on NOAAPORT but is available on the CONDUIT data stream. Although there’s a lot of data there, we'd like to know if there is additional model data you’d like to see included. And if you have ideas about what data can be removed from the current CONDUIT distribution, we'd like to hear about that too. There are different methods to make your voice heard. You may subscribe to the C2 email list or you can can send e-mail to support@unidata.ucar.edu. Additional information on CONDUIT and updates on CRAFT (level II NEXRAD data) are available.

Equipment Awards The deadline for submitting proposals for the Equipment Award Request for Proposals is drawing nearer: it's March 24. More information.

Users Workshop Progress The Unidata Users Committee's triennial workshop was announced this week. For online registration, a partial list of speakers, and other information available on the workshop homepage. Entitled: Expanding the Use of Models as Educational Tools in the Atmospheric & Related Sciences the workshop will take place July 10–14, 2006 in Boulder, Colorado.