Activities during the AMS Annual Meeting

13 January-18 January 2002, Orlando, Florida

Linda Miller, External Liaison

 

This synopsis includes information from the AMS Annual Meeting and some additional meetings that I participated in during the week.

Sunday, 13 January

Attended an all-day MeteoForum meeting. This meeting was co-sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and COMET, and chaired by Tim Spangler with Dave Fulker playing a significant role in describing Unidata and visions of potential activities relating to Unidata. MeteoForum is a pilot project, with limited funding from UCAR/UOP, to work with WMO Regions 3 and 4 Regional Meteorological Training Centers (RMTCs), to enhance their roles in education and training through information technologies and multilingual collections of resources.

There were representatives from:

Following an exchange of information, it was agreed that action would be taken to begin working toward provision of some real time data, software and technical training, and consultation from Unidata. COMET will be working with interpreters to make the COMET modules, and other educational media available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Tim Spangler will be seeking additional funding for the project, while Tom Yoksas was tasked to Chair a group to solicit information on what equipment and data sets are currently available at each site. I was tasked with Chairing a group to provide and enhance information to be posted to the MeteoForum Web site. Tim Spangler will Chair a group on development and discovery of educational materials, translations, etc.

Monday, 14 January

Met with Mike Clancy, Chief Scientist and Deputy Technical Director of Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center. We discussed the US GODAE server which is serving the NOGAPS and COAMPS data sets to the university community. David Dimitriou, previous technical contact is retiring (will probably return as a civilian), and Phil Sharfstein <Phil.Sharfstein@metnet.navy.mil> is replacing him. Phil will also be the technical lead for FNMOC for the CONDUIT project planning.

Attended a meeting regarding the Open RPG using WSR88D CODE. This is software that was developed jointly by National Severe Storms Llaboratory (NSSL), NWS, and Mitretek, and used for NEXRAD Level II (base data) analysis and development. It looks at data as though you are viewing it from the Open Radar Product Generator (ORPG). The NWS approached Unidata to provide the software to the Unidata university community. As a community service, Unidata agreed to provide the software at an FTP site for downloading, but the software will be unsupported (estimated timeframe for availability - late February 2002). An email list will be created for users to share experiences using the software. The software was demonstrated at the NWS booth during the AMS, using Level II data provided via LDM as an example of a "valued partner" with NOAA/NWS.

The planning group for the Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) met with Kelvin Droegemeier, PI, to discuss future steps to be taken if we receive word to move forward with the full ITR proposal for NSF funding. Several co-PIs have been identified for the project, including Ben Domenico, Sara Graves, University of Alabama-Huntsville, Bob Wilhelmson, NCSA-Univ of Illinois, Dennis Gannon, Indiana University. The effort will allow users to work on resources ranging from local desktop workstations to physically distributed high-performance systems, via the Grid. This proposal could provide resources for Unidata, if we are asked to submit the full proposal. Though there are many "ifs" related to this activity, a successful proposal could mean approximately 2M over a five year period for Unidata.

Tuesday, 15 January

Co-chaired, with Steve Ackerman, the "Internet Applications for Education and Research" AMS-IIPS session. The DeSouza award was presented to Doug Yarger, by Rich Clark and Dave Fulker, at the beginning of the session.

During the evening, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) provided an update on their activities, including the NOMADS project. NOMADS is collaborating with the THREDDS project. The project will be working with CONDUIT and others to coordinate model data archives to be made available through a distributed method.

Wednesday, 16 January

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. In some cases, it appeared that the sites were not using the latest version of LDM, which might hinder prompt data handling.

Action items included: