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I met with the following people at the NWS:
Mike Carelli, NEXRAD/NIDS
Ed Johnson, Strategic Policy and Planning
John Sokich, Strategic Policy and Planning
Bob Glahn, Office of System Development
Julie Hayes, FOS/NOAAPort
The NWS is in the middle of a reorganization. It has not been officially announced and many staff members are in a state of flux. The reorganization should be occurring very soon, following sign-off at the Director's level.
An important item that came from my discussion with Mike Carelli is the idea of Unidata participating in a test with 4-5 other external organizations, prior to implementation of the new service for providing NIDS data to customers after September 30, 2000. This should provide an opportunity for Unidata to learn about the data and apply the LDM for distribution of the data to university sites.
Ed Johnson, previously in the Office of Hydrology, has taken over many of the responsbilities of the Industrial Meteorology group, however more strategic planning has been undertaken in his position, at this time. John Sokich is working very closely with Ed Johnson as their tasks unfold. We discussed the CWSA, UCAR's support for the Organic Act, etc.
Next I met with Bob Glahn, Office of Systems Development (previously held by Doug Sargeant), who described some of the decoder development taking place at NWS. Very soon there will be an announcement with an updated Web site for downloading decoders. He provided a "draft" of a document entitled, "Organizational Responsibilities for Hydrometeorological Data Encoder/Decoder Software," that has been sent to Jack Kelly, Director of NWS, for approval. The document provides the overall policy on development and implementation of decoders and encoders, including identification of responsible organizations. If interested, the document is in my office.
Glahn also discussed GRIB2. He is pressing quite hard to implement GRIB2. He suggested that the use of GRIB2 would compress 40-50% of the data currently being sent. In fact, he is hoping that the radar data will be converted to GRIB2. Currently, the NIDS data is provided in a proprietary format, due to the vendors contracts for provision of the data. Bob Glahn promised to keep Unidata apprised of changes and decoder information as it becomes available.
Attending (probably not a comprehensive list):
Cliff Mass, Univ of WA, was chairman of the working group, which was called by Bob Gall, Director of the US Weather Research Program (USWRP). Several presentations were given by the participating organizations. I provided the general overview of the project. Steve Chiswell provided the technical details, followed by several other presentations by the participating organizations; NOAA/NWS/Office of Meteorology, NOAA/NWS/Office of Systems Operations, NCEP, NASA and USWRP. The meeting was quite informal with much discussion during and after each presentation.
NCEP has undergone several misfortunes over the last few months which include:
All of these issues have played a role on services from NCEP, however things appear to be improving. New FTP servers have been provided for access to the high-resolution data sets being made available. These servers replaced the antiquated NIC server.
According to Luis Cano, NCEP, there is support for the CONDUIT project by the Director of NCEP (Louis Uccellini) to continue and to improve the service for the universities. NCEP did not seem aware of router problems creating problems for data access.
Allan Darling, NWS/OSO, provided an update, but was not aware that there were problems with routers, etc. He agreed to take the lead on tracking the problem at OSO to reverse the situation. He also indicated OSO's support for the CONDUIT project. OSO is looking into AFS to be used outside of the firewall. AFS has redundant servers. Research is being conducted on AFS in preparation for the availability of NEXRAD-NIDS data from the NWS, beginning 1 October, 2000.
NASA-Goddard was represented by George Huffman who said that NASA did not get funded for the real-time data project where they intended to be using the data, so the data has not been of extreme importance to them. They will check the routers to see if one of them is down on the NASA side, which could be the clog in the CONDUIT system. He indicated that, even though they are not using the data, NASA has a commitment to the USWRP and the project to make it work.
Each university representative provided a brief overview of the service and their needs for model data. Among issues discussed were additions to the data streams, including the NOGAPS data from the Navy. Mary Alice Rennick provided some information on that data, indicating the Navy would like to have universities get access to the data. A solution to this proposal was recommended through creating an IDD relay site at the University of Washington. They are already receiving the data stream from the Navy and could provide it to others in the community who want it.
One suggestion to alleviate the congestion of the T1 during certain times of the day, included the possibility of creating a "hybrid system" including a combination of FTP and LDM service.
After much discussion among the group, the following action items were identified:
A formal summary of the meeting will be provided by Cliff Mass.
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