Arlington, Virginia
| Members |
UPC Staff |
|---|---|
| John Merrill (Chair) Agency Representatives UCAR Observers Committee Representatives
|
Ben Domenico UCAR and Unidata Not attending Agency Representatives UCAR and Unidata Observers |
Agenda: approved, following some agreed-upon shuffling of some items
27-28 February Summary Notes: approved
Next Meeting Dates
Discussion and review of 27-28 February meeting action items yielded the following:
To gauge the community's level of interest in the Profiler data, an informal poll was taken via the internet. Comments were summarized and given to UCAR's Cindy Schmidt.
New software package releases during the last few months include
LDM6
GEMPAK--31 March with the next scheduled for July.
McIDAS
An IDV non-beta release is scheduled for mid-June. Plans are underway for creating an IDV steering committee.
netCDF
The 5-year core funding proposal was favorably reviewed, Mohan reported. (Panel recommendations discussed in a later agenda item.) Review panel membership represented a diverse community. At this time no award has been made.
Other proposals: the THREDDS2G proposal has been submitted as has the LEADII proposal on which Mohan is a co-PI. The proposal to NASA to merge netCDF and HDF5 has been fully funded.
Overall the program is in good shape. The exception is funding for Case Studies which disappears at FY-end. We have submitted several proposals for external funding and feel fairly confident that some will be funded.
FY2003's core funding from NSF is projected to be 3.26 million while expenditures from the funding is anticipated to be slightly above 3.1M. Our funding scenario for FY03 represents a 8.4% increase over FY2003. NSF funding has increased significantly over the five-year period from 1998 to 2003.
The UPC has received notice that a proposal to NASA to merge Unidata' netCDF and NCSA's HDF5 will be funded at the requested level. If funding is at the requested level (~422K to the UPC) this will reduce the needed funding in the 3-5 year 2008 core funding proposal by 1 FTE.
In summary, the budget picture for the remainder of FY03 is positive, and there is reason for cautious optimism for FY2004.
Users Committee (Clark)
The Users Committee met 13-14 March in Boulder. Three members (Rockwood, Fingerhut, and Clark) will be cycling off as members of the committee. With the loss of Rich as Users Committee chair, the Policy committee will need to appoint one.
Workshop planning and development occupied most of the meeting time. At Policy Committee meeting time, registrant numbers were smaller than anticipated .Discussion of this issue yielded comments/questions: Is the topic too broad; What mechanisms were used for determining its topic area; is it possible that the impact of GIS is smaller than anticipated. Commenting on the last query, committee members noted Unidata's historic commitment to providing leadership to the community. Jacobs noted that while GIS interest and use may be small in the atmospheric sciences, its overall importance in university departments around the country is great. Additionally, researchers within UCAR/NCAR (notably Terry Bettancourt and Olga Wilhelmi) are active users of the GIS software and participants in the GIS community. Future workshop committees should consider broader based advertising: the UCAR Quarterly was mentioned specifically in this regard. (More workshop discussion occurred under a later agenda topic.)
Agency Reports
The foundation's budget is anticipated to be 6.4B for FY04.
Unidata's 5-year funding proposal, Shaping the Future was favorably reviewed both by anonymous reviewers and by a review panel convened at NSF headquarters 25-26 March. One primary request by reviewers was for Unidata to develop a means for independently measuring its success.
On the Equipment Awards proposal status, Bernard reported that the UPC would not need to prepare and send a detailed letter to NSF describing both the review process and the proposals selected for funding. However, NSF would like to continue formal reporting to the Policy Committee, and the UPC should be prepared to file such a report if necessary.
Discussion
NCDC (Watkins)
As Ben has noted in earlier presentations to the Policy Committee, funding for FY2003 for NOAA (with the exception of the CLASS project) has been unfavorable, and, FY2004 doesn't look much better.
NCDC has been able to implement improved communication with Asheville. Funding for a megapop in Tier 2 communication to DC facilitated the improvement. NOMADS too received a small increment in FY03 resulting in improved data service, particularly for small colleges.
NOAA will hold a NESDIS Data Users Workshop in Boulder in June. Users attending will represent private industry, the education sector audience, and satellite data users. The four major providers of NESDIS data (NCDC, NODC, NGDC, OSDPD) will participate.
Three defined focus areas are:
There will be an exhibit and poster session as well.
NWS (Helms)
The presentation was considerably truncated because of the unavoidable absence of NWS rep during the time scheduled, but
NPOESS is a multiple-agency effort whose mission is to: provide a national, operational polar remote-sensing capability; achieve NPR savings, incorporate new technologies from NASA, and encourage international cooperation. The tri-agency effort (NOAA, NASA, DoD) will deliver data to users world-wide; will broadcast the data openly globally at no cost to receivers; will provide a data encryption capability; will provide data processing software via the Internet to anyone who wishes to use it.
The plan will save as much as $1.3B from the cost of previously planned separate developments. System development began in August 2002. 2008 will be the earliest data availability. The six satellites that will be placed by the year 2008, working in partnership with EUMETSAT, will ensure improved global coverage and long-term continuity of observations. By positioning 15 receptor sites globally NOPOESS will be able to provide low data latency and high data availability.
NOAA (Maiden via teleconference)
The 11th ESIP Federation meeting will be in Boulder in July. All member organizations will be represented, and all 41 recipients of the soon to be awarded Research, Education, and Applications Solutions Network (REASON) are being urged to attend.
Martha and Cliff and other agency representatives are working together to form an Interagency Advisory Committee.
Four UPC staff members traveled to Arlington to meet with the review panel for the 2008 proposal. Although the panel did not request written responses to its queries, one was prepared, as was a presentation. The reviewers' comments were favorable, but some concerns were offered. They were:
The panel expressed that the UPC provided them with excellent answers to these questions. A few highlights from the panel's recommendation:
Thematic Realtime Environmental Data Distributed Services, THREDDS, is part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL. Its goal is to provide access to data through data library compound documents which are electronic publications with embedded pointers to datasets and tools. Users have the same power and control of the data whether remote or local, but they do not have to be local. THREDDS connects users of the data to analysis and display tools.
The LDEO site publishes catalogs of available datasets--a "thin" client while inventory catalogues are thick clients.
THREDDS is working toward interoperability with GIS datasets which will facilitate our interaction with some newer members of our emerging community, hydrologists and social scientists.
ATD will deploy its S-pol radar to Illinois during the fall of 2003 for a field project to be used in a web learning exercise. Students in lab courses in radar instrumentation will use the data in real-time exercises. ATD proposes to use the IDV as the visualization tool.
The summer Unidata Users Committee workshop, Expanding Horizons: Using Environmental Data and Model Output for Education, Prediction, and Decision Making will be held in June in Boulder. Presentations will include a look at Unidata's first 20 years. The past will be covered by past director Dave Fulker, while Mohan will cover the present, and Cliff will present thoughts on where Unidata is headed. Subsequent days will focus on GIS, case studies, policy and education, and the workshop concludes with a panel discussion.
Discussion:
Sixteen equipment award proposals were received, one of them a request from an international institution. A summary:
At least half have applied successfully in the past
A few were unsuccessful in past applications
All requests were within the stated financial limits
Some contained cost matching capabilities
An appeals process is in place should that be required
Discussion:
This agenda item and the discussion that followed its presentation was precipitated by a request from a site representative, Tony Hansen at St. Cloud State. In the form of a memo/letter to program director Ramamurthy and Users Committee Chair, Rich Clark, the communication requested support for a forecasting exercise widely used in introductory course. The exercise consists of two pieces:
The problem for users of the service lies in the second piece. The ClassNet server is going away, and no documentation exists on the script that drove it. Therefore the request from Hansen is that Unidata provide a web service to support the exercise, which seems logical since the verifications for the forecasts come from Unidata datasets.
Discussion:
Action Item: Mohan and Rich will compose a response to Boysen detailing the planned response to his request, that
Finally, discussion yielded the following bit of doggerel (think Day-O):
Data, Data
Data come and it all go out
Data come and it all go out
Come Mr. Unidata verify me forecast
We don't keep it, it all go out
We don't keep it, it all go out
Murphy and Clark conducted an e-mail survey to ascertain how community members are faring in the present economic condition: specifically with budget cuts a reality in many member institutions. Survey answers were received primarily from U.S. member institutions of higher learning, but a few government agencies and foreign institutions of higher learning responded as well. Responses ranged from the possibility of eliminating an entire department to "no budget cuts" to date (of the survey).
Some specific ways cuts are being implemented are:
Discussion:
Among ideas suggested were the following:
Discussion centered on the letter sent by John (as Committee Chair) to Cornell and Cornell's response to it. The letter, which was addressed to Cornell's President, Hunter Rawlings, was answered by the Vice President for Information Technologies, Polley Ann McClure. The response indicated that the Dean's office had "specfically agreed to take care of the NCAR server communications costs. Although there seemed to be some ambivalence in Vice President McClure's response when she later stated that in working with owners of servers consuming large amounts of bandwidth, they planned to eliminate "over half of the bandwidth usage." The site representative at Cornell, Bill Noon, has proposed the Cornell could become a leaf node with ATM becoming a relay node and picking up what Cornell would have to drop.
The meeting yielded the following Action Items:
Action Item 1: In appointing new members, the Policy Committee (with input from UPC staff) will identify a database expert to fill an existing vacancy.
Action Item 2: Rich Clark and Mohan will compose a response to Tony Hansen to clarify how Unidata will assist in creating a process for facilitating the web-based forecasting exercise he requested.
Action Item 3: The Policy Committee requests that the Users Committee review and make recommendations to the Policy Committee on how to accommodate requests such as the above
Action Item 4: The Program Center should maintain awareness and monitor the pay-per-byte policy under consideration at some member sites and should consider proposing a pre-emptive solution.