Policy Committee Meeting Summary:

17-18 October 2002

Arlington, Virginia

Participants

Administrative Matters

• Agenda was approved
• Summary Notes of the February 2002 meeting were approved pending suggested minor editorial changes by Mohan Ramamurthy.
• Next meeting dates:
  • 20-21 February 2003 in Boulder
  • 19-20 May 2003 in Boulder
• Action Items:
  1. Send thank you letters to Users Committee nominees (incomplete)
  2. Appoint Raj Pandja DLESE liaison to the Users Committee (done)
  3. Revise charge to the Users Committee to reflect number 2 (done)
  4. Circulate LEAD proposal's reviewers comments to the committee
  5. Circulate Terri Bettancourt (RAP) internal report re GIS data (done)
  6. Seek additional collaboration letters for 2008 proposal. (done) Suggested:
     CUAHSI
     FNMOC
     GEON
     ESIP
     Unavco
     WSI
     International contacts/collaborators
     NCAR/Killeen
  7. Submit funding proposal via Fastlane and simultaneously send 1 hard
     copy notebook. (done)
  8. Prepare and send proposal CDs (40 of them) (done)
  9. Possible submission of proposal to directorates other than GEO (pending).
  10. Make community aware that IDV is support is available (Stu Wier)

Status Reports

Director's Report (Domenico)

Budget Report (Graham)

Users Committee (Clark)

Agency Reports

National Science Foundation: (Grant)

Agency-wide Cliff noted the following :

• Funding for FY02 is quite good with an overall increase of 8.4% from FY01.
• Most increases fund new personnel salaries and expenses.
• Funding for EHR will increase in both 02 and 03.
• Major Research Equipment/Facilities Construction funding is decreasing as most projects targeted under the initiative are at acceptable funding levels.
  • Of particular interest to the UCAR community is funding for the aircraft HIAPER which is not in the budget, but the assumption is that Congress will add funds for it into the budget just as they did last year.
• Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences is a priority area in FY03 as is mathematics research and education.
• Funds for a multi-agency climate research initiative and for the science and technology centers are among other highlights of the FY03 budgets.
• Fiscal 03 looks like it is 5% over FY02's level, but this is somewhat misleading because it contains a proposed transfer of 74M from other agencies (NOAA, USGS, EPA) to NSF, but NSF has no mechanism for administering the funds, and they likely will be transferred back to the original agencies.

GEO's anticipated increase for FY03 is 13.4%; its funding is up 40% since 2000. The increased funding for FY03 will be targeted towards areas specifically called out in NSF Geosciences Beyond 2000: planetary metabolism, planetary energetics and dynamics, planetary structure, and planetary ecology.

The environmental cyberinfrastructure (see NOTE below) initiative is an agency-wide undertaking to define the cyberinfrastructure needs for the environmental initiative. Environmental communities have defined their problems chief among which is the lack of cyberinfrastructure.

NOTE: cyberinfrastructure was defined by NSF's CISE head (Ruzena Bajcsy) and includes supercomputers, visualization, human-computer interactions, high performance communication networks, the Grid, federated data repositories, collaboration tools, on-line instruments and fabrication facilities, digital libraries, collaboratories, knowledge networks, knowledge ecologies, and research universities of the future.

Discussion
Responding to a question about the ITR and Biodiversity initiatives, Cliff noted that while it is true that these initiatives are winding down the funds remain a part of the NSF budget. In other discussion Cliff noted that NSF's budget is reviewed and allocated in congressional committee.

NCDC: (Watkins)

NOAA/NWS: (Helms)

NASA: (Maiden)

NASA's Earth Science Enterprise focuses on extending the use of Earth science and remote sensing technologies to develop a tool for decision makers in nationally important areas, i.e., to get data to the right people. ESE partners with the information community to disseminate information.

ESE provides systems engineering, research and technology development within an information framework of data sources, data products, data distribution, and decision support systems associated with Earth science and remote sensing. ESE works in partnerships with information community.

Our challenge and opportunity is to identify, and realize the potential for, earth science and remote sensing technology solutions to contribute spatial information products to serve decision support system objectives that are in the national interest.

Discussion:
Making NASA datasets available to the Unidata community would be a valuable collaborative activity. Of particular interest are: scatterometry, coastal, and forecast models.

Action Item 3: Martha Maiden and Ben Domenico will initiate discussions on how to more effectively represent and serve our two communities. Specifically they will explore the following:

• Interoperable models
• Making NASA datasets available to the Unidata community
• Coastal datasets/ocean datasets as a possible near term goal
• Next generation netCDF development--possible integration with HDF

GIS (McNeeley)

Shannon presented the steps taken thus far to implement the action item from the October meeting for increased collaboration between Unidata and ESIG. The most visible and probably the most important action undertaken thus far has been the collaboration mentioned earlier by Dave, that of coordinating the GIS seminar series. In addition Unidata staff members have participated in an ESIG "coffee break" presentation. The seminar series has included a range of speakers including Unidata visitor, Stefano Nativi, whose presentation included details of his work at the UPC on Geospatial Information Interoperability.

The NCAR GIS Initiative began as a directive in the NCAR Strategic Plan. Its goals are threefold: to explore opportunities that geographic information technology can offer for integrated interdisciplinary research both within the organization and between NCAR and the research community; interoperability and data exchange; and visualization and improved means of communicating scientific information to the public.

GIS applications are employed in emergency management, and it may be possible to get Wayne Blanchard, FEMA higher education project head to speak at the next Policy Committee meeting. The energy sector, pollen forecasters, and the agricultural community are among other GIS users.

Unidata Users Survey results reflected interest on the part of the community to have access to GIS datasets.

Other possibilities for continuing and amplifying the ESIG/Unidata collaboration are: exploring proposal possibilities and exploring partnerships for demographic/socio-economic data.

Director's Search (Fellows [by conference call])

The Unidata Director's search is underway with applications being accepted until May 1. A wide net is being cast in the search to ensure that the applicant pool is diverse in every sense. Imagination and vision are imperative . The goal is to distribute awareness both within and from outside of the atmospheric science committee. At this time the announcement has been made via an all-community e-mail to Unidata's community, and advertisements that will be placed in EOS, AAAS: Science, Chronicle of Higher Education, IEEE, AWIS: Association of Women in Science, Black Issues in Higher Education and possibly other sites or publications. The search panel includes a Policy Committee member, a UPC staff member, a UOP director, an NCAR Director from a division that works closely with Unidata, and possibly a fifth member from outside UCAR..

The search presents a challenge to the Policy Commitee. Jack requested that committee members be diligent in their participation in the process. Members wishing to make candidate suggestions should contact Jack at: Extension 303 497-8655, or jfellows@ucar.edu and to assist in distributing awareness of the process outside of the Atmospheric Science.

Discussion
The search panel is flexible on the interview process to be employed; either a presentation or interview process will be considered, and it will be an interactive process. Policy Committee concerns will be represented in the search by the presence of a committee member sitting on the panel.

Jack will update the Policy Committee as the search progresses.

Strategic Planning (Fulker)

Some significant changes were made to the Strategic Planning document since the October 2001 Policy Committee meeting. Chief among them is language that recognizes the importance of the collaboration (already begun) with social and environmental groups. Thus a new bullet was added to the "Core Values" section of the proposal which states that support for studying crucial scientific and social issues is a core value. The social issues theme was echoed in the Goals and Objectives section where suggested modifications included adding GIS databases to the "software to visualize/analyze geoscience data" bullet, and an "including social issues" phrase was added to the support and engagement of diverse users bullet.

Other suggested changes are:

• Tying Unidata's strategic efforts more closely to the NCAR Strategic Plan
• Proceeding cautiously with verbiage that links Unidata to a strong leadership role in areas outside its traditional community. Suggested changes would not eliminate moving into a broader community, but should emphasize a more collaborative role
• Including references to the contributions the UPC might make to the cyberinfrastructure (clarified earlier in this document)
• Clarifying the target audience for the document, which led to a suggestion to soften the public document
• Ventilating the document to a large number of community members
• Eliminating confusion by adding a glossary to the document
• Editing the document for consistency

Following this discussion, further revision to the document occurred which reflected the suggested changes and emphases. See the Adopted Strategic Plan .

Tuesday, 26 February 2002

Unidata Equipment Grants Proposal (Graham)

Action Item 1 from the October 2001 meeting stated: The Policy Committee recommends that the UPC write an unsolicited proposal to the National
Science Foundation to administer internally the Unidata Equipment Grants process following a careful cost analysis of impacts to the Program. In response to that item, Joanne reported the following steps undertaken at the Program Center:

• Optimally, the proposal that the UPC submits should be low in overhead expense and high in utility to the community.
• An internal UPC committee has determined the following:
  • We can afford to support the administrative segment (reviewing proposals, apprising applicants of proposal status, and administering the grants as sub-contracts
  • We are unable to purchase, configure, and ship equipment
  • We will not seek to obtain exceptions to internal UCAR overhead policies to administer the grants
  • We will develop a plan to ensure a fair and equitable review process, one that insulates the UPC from directly deciding how much is available for equipment grants each year and from being the sole decision-maker on proposal award recipients
  • Cost sharing will not be explicitly called out for proposal success, but will be encouraged
• The Users Committee will have the opportunity to review proposal prior to its being submitted
  

NSF is now awaiting a proposal from the UPC with details about how it plans to administer the Equipment Grants.

2008 Funding Proposal (Domenico)

Work on the 5-year funding (2003-2008) proposal has begun. The timing for submitting the proposal (mid-October 2002) may present some interesting challenges: it will, essentially, be complete when the new director is seated in the UPC, but obviously that individual may wish to influence the document. Nonetheless we cannot delay the writing of it.

Action Item 4: The Program Center will produce a working draft of the 2008 proposal for the next Policy Committee Meeting (20-21 May 2002).

At least five areas of increased demand and emphasis were noted:

• Enhanced real-time data delivery
• New data types (especially in high resolution local modeling and visualization)
• Enhanced data storage infrastructure (next generation netCDF)
• Retrospective data access (Integration of environmental data into digital libraries)
• Better data and software training materials
  

Committee members Ackerman and Rammamurthy volunteered to assist the program staff with proposal development.

Closer Interaction with UCAR/NCAR (Merrill)

This item generated a great deal of discussion. While it seems that the UPC is working cooperatively more than ever with NCAR (e.g., ATD, USWRP, RAP), the amount of actual planning coordination that occurs is unclear. Closer coordination in the planning and proposal submitting areas is greatly to be wished. (A major problem in submitting joint proposals with NCAR divisions is the difference in our overhead rates.)

The committee determined that Ben, as Acting Director, will contact several NCAR directors seeking and requesting more coordination at the strategic level. John will initiate discussion with Rick Anthes to determine how we might be more effective in our interactions.

The meeting adjourned at 12:45 PM, a personal best for most attendees.

Address questions or suggested changes to Jo Hansen.