The CONDUIT working group met to discuss CONDUIT status and future data sets. This meeting was hosted by the U.S. Weather Research Program. The meeting, attended by university, NCEP, NWS, UCAR and Navy representatives, offered a venue to discuss future planning for the project.

Steve Chiswell presented the current status of the CONDUIT feed with possible options to stimulate discussion. There are 15 sites actively involved in CONDUIT. The reliability of the FTP servers at NWS and NCEP has improved significantly, due to enhancements of the equipment. Some user representatives indicated more reliability from the servers than using the CONDUIT feed. If a user needs only a small subset of the CONDUIT data products, obtaining the products via the FTP server is probably more efficient than delivery by LDM, due to the volume of other available data products being delivered. The LDM provides the ease of having the datasets delivered automatically, rather than polling from the FTP site.

Conceivably, 10GB per hour could be available via the Internet2/Abilene if product arrival were constantly paced. However, LDM product queue size and delivery schedules of various models make that impossible to achieve. Currently, about 1.2 gigabytes per hour are delivered during peak hours. The product queue at NWS is currently less than 1.2 gigabytes, and needs to be increased in size to accomodate the current volume of data.

Dropping grids is bad and all relay sites need to run one-minute statistics to be sure they are coping with all of the data. In some cases, it appeared that the sites were not using the latest version of LDM, which might hinder prompt data handling. If grids are dropped from CONDUIT, the users cannot use the data for initialialization of models.

Planned NCEP changes for model output include:
The AVN will be run 4 times per day, out to 16 days. MRF products will be created from the AVN data for an additional six months following the changes in resolution and output of the AVN, after which the MRF will no longer be available from NCEP. RUC will be going to 20km. NCEP will be increasing AVN ensembles.

Datastream contents and volumes were discussed in detail. This URL lists the current "Datastream Contents" available for CONDUIT.

The issue of archiving model data was discussed. NOMADS is an NCDC project whose mission is to determine which model datasets need to be archived and made available at NCDC. There are several disparate archiving efforts going on throughout the university community, based on the needs of the particular users. Discussion about model data availability on NCAR's mass store led to discussions of access availability for university users. A current status is needed regarding these issues.

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Action items:

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Recorder:
Linda Miller - lmiller@unidata.ucar.edu
External Liaison, Unidata
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000
303 497-8646 fax: 303-497-8690