Ask Paul Sirvatka, College of DuPage about what drives him, and his answer will usually come down to this: students and teaching. Paul was named DuPage Outstanding Faculty member for 2005, an honor that is in line with his goal of providing an outstanding learning experience for all of his students.

To meet this challenging goal, Paul initiated an ambitious online weather lab called NEXLAB. As with most efforts of this size, Paul was not alone. Unidata's head of support and McIDAS developer Tom Yoksas, among others, lent encouragement and assistance. NEXLAB provides access to teaching materials for Paul's classes as well as forecasting tools and information used by his students and by a user group that includes faculty, K-12 educators, emergency managers, broadcast meteorologists, goverment officials, and military personnel. The beauty of NEXLAB's rich source of weather information is that it serves this range of users as well as the weather professional, while remaining accessible and useful to beginning meteorology students. With millions of hits per month, there can be little doubt about the site's impact. NEXLAB makes abundant use of Unidata's data streams as well two of Unidata's visualization and analysis packages--GEMPAK and McIDAS. Futhermore, as an active participant in Unidata's LDM/IDD distribution system, the College of DuPage plays a key role in the Unidata community having served as a data relay node in the past and currently serving as a failover site.

Most of Paul's students are general education majors and fit the profile of the traditional community college student in the sense that they are pursuing Associate degrees. Students vary, however, in terms of age and life experience. Some, for example, are retired and taking courses for personal enrichment. Although this diversity enhances the overall educational experience, it can be challenging to find common ground for the teaching process. The use of Unidata materials helps build a common frame of reference for this widely diverse range of students.

After completing the two year program, many of Paul's meteorology students go on to schools with four year programs. Transferring students find that they are well prepared to enter four year programs since the College of DuPage's program is comprehensive with course offerings that include four semesters of forecasting classes as well as severe weather analysis, mesoscale meteorology, and intermediate meteorology. This constitutes a strong academic start for the first two years of the undergraduate educational experience. The variety of data available to the College of DuPage program through Unidata enriches the learning experience.

The highlight of the College of DuPage's meteorology program is the annual severe weather field experience program, AKA storm chasing. The program consists of a total of five trips with students focusing on one of two tracks. The first track is geared toward participants with a general interest in weather--especially severe weather, while the other is oriented toward educational requirements for meteorology majors. The trips are popular and fill up quickly. Storm chasing routes are dictated by the weather which, while not entirely surprising, does underscore the importance of flexibility. Providing an informative, safe experience is the ultimate goal, but it would be a mistake to suppose that excitement is not on the agenda as well. This season's participants will enjoy the convenience of two brand new vans that are meticulously fitted out to serve not only as transportation, but as rolling classrooms as well. Making the best use of their time on the road and a unique learning experience, the vans are equipped with computers for video presentations.

It's easy to see that College of DuPage is a great example of a community member that uses Unidata systems to facilitate education, research, and outreach. As Paul might say, "For freshmen and sophomores, I would say there is not a better place to learn meteorology than at the College of DuPage."

Editor's Note: This article is the first in our series of snapshots of current research in the atmospheric sciences and examples of innovative uses of weather data and technologies, a new newsletter feature conceived by Gene Takle of Iowa State University.

CUAHSI Web Services for Weather Data Products

By David R. Maidment of the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas at Austin

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) has developed web services for accessing national data archives of water information. Entitled WaterOneFlow, these services enable direct access to the data without manual use of web pages. See CUAHSI's web pages for details. One such service is NCAR’s DayMet for which a manual query with a specific latitude and longitude point yields a daily time series from 1980 onwards of temperature, precipitation, and other climate variables that have been interpolated from climate station data. The CUAHSI web service programmatically mimics the manual use of this web site. An example illustrated below is for a watershed study where five years of daily precipitation data are needed for each watershed as input to a hydrologic model. By querying DayMet with the latitude and longitude of the centroid of each watershed, a coherent time series record is obtained without the necessity of accessing individual rain gage records, filling in gaps, and spatially interpolating them as would normally be required. It takes about 10 minutes to obtain 5 years of daily precipitation for the 105 watersheds shown in the illustration. A hydrologic scientist would otherwise spend days constructing equivalent information directly from rain gage records, so the use of CUASHI web services is a great time saver.

CUAHSI is presently exploring with Unidata the creation of similar web services into Unidata’s real-time data feeds. These promise to provide up-to-date weather and climate information for hydrologic science. An advantage of using CUAHSI web services to access such data is that the downloaded result can be presented in popular applications such as Excel, ArcGIS, and Matlab, under the Windows operating system.

NetCDF: A recent netCDF release, version 3.6.1, was announced earlier this year, but a new version, 3.6.2 is in the works and will be released soon. So if you have not already installed 3.6.1, you could save yourself some effort by waiting to install 3.6.2 instead. It improves the ease of building from source on some platforms, fixes a rare bug that triggers an assertion violation, fixes another minor but long-standing problem resulting in files slightly longer than necessary (up to 3 bytes!), and adds a new tutorial.

An alpha test release of netCDF-4 is available now for developers. The supported release of netCDF-4.0 is dependent on the completion of HDF5-1.8, which is now scheduled for October 2006.

GEMPAK: A new release, GEMPAK 5.9.2, is in progress which includes updated Level II radar routines for additional VCPs and openRDA product IDs. A new program, GDCSV, has been generated to create a comma separated output of data values at grid and lat/lon point locations. This program can be used to output location of maximas found using the HIGH and LOWS functions. And the ability to display revised netCDF formats for 2-D and 3-D radar mosaics which will be available from NSSL in the near future.

THREDDS: The THREDDS Data Server (TDS) is now at release number 3.8. It has the functionality of the OPeNDAP Aggregation server. Improvements and bug fixes to the TDS/OPeNDAP server include the capability for using session cookies for increased reliability and performance.

2006 Unidata Users Workshop: Registration is open through the end of April for Unidata's summer users workshop! The workshop, hosted every 3 years and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is scheduled for July 10 - 14th, 2006 at UCAR's Center Green Campus in Boulder, Colorado.

This year's workshop, entitled Expanding the Use of Models as Educational Tools in the Atmospheric & Related Sciences, focuses on expanding of the use of computational models in traditional undergraduate and graduate courses, sharing existing resources that have been developed in our community, and identifying aspects of numerical modeling which are most critical to teach at various educational levels.

Please visit the workshop homepage for more information about the workshop. We hope to see you this summer!