by Melanie Wetzel, Unidata Policy Committee Chair, University of Nevada/Desert Research Institute

NSF Program Officer, Cliff Jacobs, at the 2005 EGU in Vienna, Austria.

Unidata has made tremendous advances in the application of Internet Data Distribution (IDD) software and networking on an international scale, reaching the Caribbean, Central America, and Brazil as well as Antarctica.  Multiple academic and research groups use the IDD outside the U.S. for meteorological monitoring and study, as conveyed at special session activities during the AGU Spring Meeting. Elen Cutrim (a Unidata Users Committee member from Western Michigan University) and Tom Yoksas (Unidata) presided over the AGU sessions that focused on cyberinfrastructure contributions to international collaboration, as described in the May issue of the Unidata CommunitE-letter.  Travel suport to help international participants attend the conference was provided through funds received from a successful proposal submitted to NSF by Tom and Elen.  The Unidata Policy Committee applauds these efforts and would like to encourage the expansion of international partnerships, particularly between universities, that benefit from Unidata capabilities

Although Unidata has long fostered and maintained international interactions, an initiative starting in 2001 called MeteoForum was its first structured move into international activity. Funded by a joint proposal between Unidata and COMET to the UCAR Office of Programs Director's STORM Funds opportunity, the activities were best characterized as a natural extension of outreach activities to the international higher education research and education community.

From this beginning Unidata's international outreach focuses on:

• Helping build capabilities through the extension of Unidata tools
• Promoting the free and open sharing of locally-held data collections
  of interest to the community
• Fostering the "organic" expansion of the Unidata community

Most significantly, though, all of the above are parts of the overall goal of sharing knowledge and experience.

Elen Cutrim of Western Michigan University, a frequent collaborator on international activities.

Two recent multi-institution research programs supported by NSF and UCAR, the RICO and T-REX programs, adopted the Unidata IDV software for data acquisition and analysis activities. These projects fostered international collaborations that can lead to student and faculty exchange, as well as improved understanding of meteorological processes in different regions. Potential sources of funding to promote international academic partnerships include the Fulbright Program; NSF (programs in the Office of International Science &  Engineering; cross-cutting programs and discipline-specific programs with an international component ), and establishing sister-university charters with support from university foundations or contributors. The UCAR International Affiliates represent institutions that are already familiar with UCAR and could be excellent partners for establishing exchanges of teaching and research activities with global themes.  

To assist us in fostering more international teamwork, we are asking you to compose an e-mail message noting the following:

1. Any international universities or research groups you currently interact with; for respondents outside the U.S., please reply regarding any U.S. or other outside country partnerships you have.
2. How using Unidata software and IDD data acquisition promotes international partnerships for advancement of atmospheric research and education.
3. How using Unidata could contribute to the development of international academic partnerships (international workshops; interaction with UCAR International Affiliates; demonstration of software for meteorological analysis for international regions; etc).

Please send your reply to: intl_partners@unidata.ucar.edu; or if you would prefer to discuss ideas with me directly, please e-mail me Melanie.Wetzel@dri.edu, and let me know how I can contact you by phone.

Thank you for your feedback!   

Web services are revolutionizing the way companies and other organizations conduct their daily business. The Unidata Program Center recognizes their value and is working to gradually migrate its data services and tools to work in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework.

Web services, based on machine-to-machine communication using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), are emerging as tools for creating next generation distributed services. Besides recognizing heterogeneity as a fundamental ingredient, web services, can be bundled, published, shared, discovered, and invoked as needed to accomplish specific tasks. They can be deployed to perform either simple, individual tasks or they can be chained to perform complicated business or scientific processes because of their building-block nature. As a result, web services, implemented in an SOA or framework, are being proposed as a promising technology for communicating between organizations and deploying cyberinfrastructure for data services.

Traditional obstacles to interfacing legacy and packaged applications with data systems are being overcome by wrapping existing applications and their components as web services in an SOA. This approach to lightweight integration affords an easier pathway to interoperability amongst disparate systems and distributed services. The new software architectures, based largely on web services standards, are enabling entire new service-oriented and event-driven architectures that are challenging traditional approaches to data services. An SOA provides a realistic plan for migrating existing or legacy applications that leverages existing assets while allowing for incremental implementation and migration of those assets to a web services paradigm. 

Several efforts are underway within the atmospheric sciences community to apply web services and service oriented architectures to migrate existing, stove-piped data systems while developing common architectures for future data systems. For example, the strategic plan for the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System specifies the implementation of GEOSS services within a web-enabled, component-based architecture in its overall data management strategy to maximize the value of Earth observations data and information resources. Similarly, the Integrated Ocean Observing System and the NOAA Group on Earth Observations Integrated Data Environment (GEO-IDE) are both planning to use an SOA/web services approach for providing data services to their respective communities.

Unidata strives to be part of a world in which common data services support creating, archiving, cataloging, discovering, accessing, analyzing, visualizing, and preserving scientific data. The web services approach will facilitate interoperability and cross platform integration of disparate applications, an important goal. It will enable Unidata to achieve its objective of broadening its data services to other geoscience disciplines more quickly.

GEMPAK Expect to see the announcement of release number 5.9.3 toward the end of this month or very early in the next. Briefly, new features include:

• layer diagnostics that add the capability to compute the maximum or minimum of a scalar quantity over specified levels and optionally compute the value of an output grid function where the max or min of the input grid occurs
• the ability to compute the value of a function on a specified isosurface defined by a second function
• the capability to change the time matching rules for each dominant data source type has been added to NMAP2
• Enhancement of Tropical Storm and Radial Wind Forecasts Display Flash Flood Watches in NMAP2 and GPMAP

A more detailed description of these new features can be found in the release notes. For additional information, see the GEMPAK homepage.

IDV Our developers are preparing a new release that will be used at the Unidata Users Committee Workshop July 10-14. This release will contain numerous new features and updates, several of them resulting from user input. One significant difference is the "dashboard" that has been created to alleviate the problem of the IDV opening numerous popups. The dashboard is a dock for the Data Chooser, Field Selector, and the Display Control windows and also provides quick access to users' favorite bundles, history menus, and saved data sources. Following the workshop, the release will be finalized and announced to the community. For more information, see the IDV homepage.

THREDDS The latest THREDDS Data Server (TDS) stable release, number 3.10, has added the ability for the Web Coverage Server (WCS) to serve netCDF Markup Language aggregated datasets and the ability to allow Open Archives Initiative harvesting of enhanced catalogs by discovery services like GCMD and DLESE. BUFR files are being decoded into the Common Data Model in anticipation of IDD datastreams moving to BUFR. For more information, see the THREDDS homepage.

Editor's Note: The alphabet soup of acronym-loaded sentences above prompts us to direct your attention to Unidata's publicly-available Glossary/Acronym list. The list is under constant review and undergoes frequent revision, so if you see anything in it that seems inaccurate or incomplete, please let us know.

Users Committee Nominations A Call for Nominations by Melanie Wetzel, Unidata Policy Committee Chair, to the Unidata's Users Committee has been relayed to the all-community e-mail list. If you missed that announcement, there's still time to send your nominations to nominations@unidata.ucar.edu. Briefly, Users Committee members commit to attending biannual meetings in Boulder to participate in discussions about taking the community's pulse, making suggestions about data streams and software products, and in general, facilitating the dialogue among community members and software developers.

AMS Abstract Deadline August 1 is the deadline for submitting abstracts for the 87th AMS Annual Meeting to be held January 14- 18, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, see the AMS website.

Community Postings We invite community members to post job openings and event announcements to our web site. Your posting should include a heading, an expiration date, and a URL that links to your opportunity. Send the information to opportunities@unidata.ucar.edu.

2006 SOARS Students The program center welcomes SOARS student Shanna-Shaye Forbes for a second summer at Unidata. Shanna's work this summer will be done in collaboration with her science/technical mentor netCDF developer, Russ Rew. Its title is, "A C++ interface for netCDF-4." When complete the new C++ interface will make access to netCDF data available for C++ developers, just as the C and Fortran interfaces will provide access for C and Fortran developers when the software is released later this year.

Other staff participating as mentors this year include Jeff Weber and Anne Wilson, community mentors, and Jo Hansen, writing/communication mentor. Unidata staff have a fine record of contributing expertise, time, and energy to the SOARS effort. For a nice description of mentors's responsibilities see Mentor's FAQ.