Enhancing COMET Case Studies For Use In A Diverse Community

2. Background

COMET develops case studies for use in COMET Residence Program courses and Computer-Based Learning (CBL) modules. The case studies consist of collections of data pertaining to weather phenomena of interest to the research and operations communities. These case studies have been distributed from COMET (via 8mm tape and FTP) to NWS offices and some universities for research and training programs, but the distribution mechanism has been inconvenient and time consuming for people in field offices and university institutions.

Varying in size from one to three gigabytes, the case study data sets include data from the WSR-88D radars; multi-spectral geostationary (GOES 8 and GOES 9) satellites; computer models including the Meso-Eta, NGM, MRF, AVN, and RUC; surface and upper air data; atmospheric wind profiler data; and text products.

Making COMET case study data available via CODIAC allows users easy access to the data through CODIAC's WWW user interface. CODIAC allows users to browse the data as graphical plots and images before retrieving the desired data by FTP or on removable media, such as 8mm tapes.

The CODIAC system (the URL is http://www.joss.ucar.edu/codiac/) employs easy to use fill-out forms to guide the user through the steps of selecting, browsing, and retrieving data. There are two main paths for locating data of interest. The first method is to search all the data in CODIAC by space and time. The second method allows the user to select a specific research program, field project, or case study.

When searching by space and time the user is prompted to give a date and time range and a latitude and longitude range. All the data sets in CODIAC are searched for data in the region of interest. The resulting list of data sets is displayed for the user.

If the user knows the case study of interest, that case study can be selected from a list of all the projects/case studies in the CODIAC system. This method will return a list of all the data sets in the selected project.

The lists give brief descriptions of each data set. Clicking on a data set's title displays a page that contains more information on that data set including a more detailed description, the time range of the data set, and the latitude and longitude range of the data set. From this page the data can be browsed and/or retrieved. The data are selected for browsing and retrieval by user-specified time and latitude/longitude ranges. For browsing, CODIAC can display data in a variety of ways including time series plots, skew-T/Log-P plots, histograms, contour plots, and 3-D surface plots.

The purpose of using the CODIAC system for the COMET case studies is to create the mechanisms for browsing images in the case studies, to create additional metadata for each case study, to segment the data according to user-defined needs, and to add additional data from the community. Additional advantages of the CODIAC system include the seamless access to COMET data and overlapping past JOSS-supported field projects and the ability to incrementally add new data. Thus, using CODIAC provides a vehicle to create more comprehensive data sets, and serves to eliminate the lengthy and expensive development process of creating a new system. With its many features, including a WWW user interface for use with geophysical data sets, and a proven track record of performance, CODIAC is an excellent choice for making the COMET case study data widely available.

Unidata has been tracking the COMET case study development since 1993. In the past, data format issues and cumbersome access methods hindered wide use of the case studies at university institutions. Use of the CODIAC system will make the case studies easily accessible and easier to adapt for use in academic institutions.

This page was Webified by Ethan Davis
Questions or comments can be sent to <edavis@unidata.ucar.edu>.

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