Yuan Ho has been added to the staff of Unidata and will be working half-time on the Case Study Project. Jeff Weber will persist as the technical lead on this project and still be active in the case studies. Yuan comes to Unidata via the University of Oklahoma meteorology department and the University of Idaho computer science department where he achieved Masters degrees. We look forward to working with Yuan. Some tasks already handled by Yuan include completing the scripting to further automate the loading process. Having Yuan's assistance will allow Jeff to pursue his LDM/IDD support work with greater vigor.
Case studies 19-39 are now available in netCDF as well as the standard GRIB, GEMPAK, NIDS, and MCIDAS formats.
The future for the netCDF versions continues in the WES (Weather Event Simulator)/DRT(Displaced Real Time) format. This will be used on the NWS AWIPS platforms to provide real-time weather simulations and a more accurate representation of the forecasting scenario in the field.
Associated with the WES/DRT datasets will be a robust set of exercises and tutorials regarding the event. Although most of the university community will not possess the WES/DRT feature, they will benefit from the added detail going into the exercises and curriculum surrounding the case study.
The downside to this new enriched case study scenario, is that COMET will produce only 3 cases per year instead of the 12 we offerred last year. To offset this output disparity, COMET and Unidata will generate non WES/DRT cases for use by the entire community and we will continue to ask the community to contribute cases and curriculum material to deepen the coverage of the case study library.
The COMET Case Study Library has been reactive to significant weather events and modified publishing schedule to address these data demands. The latest example being the Kansas City icing event of 1/29 -> 1/31 2002.
We continue to investigate including NOGAPS model output from FNMOC and GEM model output from Environment Canada to future case studies. The LDM has been installed at Environment Canada and we expect model ouput products to begin flowing next week.
In response to the demand for the cases to be delivered via CD, we will begin offering CD's as a media choice in the very near future.
For more details of upcoming case study releases, see the case study
Plan and Status Report ---http://www.comet.ucar.edu/status/casestat.htm
