Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
The majority of new interest in Unidata McIDAS is coming from sites outside of the US.
During the Fall 2006 Policy Committee meeting, a response to the call for internal proposals for the UOP Director's STORM fund was developed. The proposal, representing a collaboration among Unidata, and NCAR's Earth Observing and Research Applications Laboratories, requested funding for the following activities:
In October, 2006, UCAR submitted this proposal to NESDIS which funded it for the full requested amount of $30K.
On the evening of January 30, Unidata successfully began ingesting GOES-10 (referred to internally as GOES-South) imagery using equipment that had been surplussed by various groups in NCAR/UCAR and the Unidata community (e.g., retired USAN satellite dish from NCAR/CISL; TeraScan (tm) satellite receiver (SeaSpace Inc.) from NCAR/RAL; PC satellite ingest card from the Weather Underground, Inc., etc.), and McIDAS SDI software licensed from the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On Wednesday, January 31 GOES-South imager sectors were integrated into the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream (IDD feedtype UNIWISC) for the benefit of the US and increasingly international Unidata community, especially university participants in Latin America. Any system participating in the IDD has access to the data (currently over 400 systems at over 210 sites). GOES-South imagery is now accessible to any ADDE-enabled application (e.g., McIDAS, IDV, etc.) with Internet access.
The establishment of GOES-10 ingest capabilities in UCAR will be a large portion of Rick Anthes President's Corner article in the March 2007 UCAR newsletter.
SDI interface cards donated to the UPC by the LSU/SRCC and St. Louis University will be used to establish a GOES-East and GOES-West ingest and ADDE serving capability in UCAR and as spare parts (active, Schmidt, Yoksas).
Future Activities:
March-May, 2007:
Spring-Summer, 2007:
Full resolution GOES-East/West imagery is also available via ADDE from a Unidata-owned, toplevel IDD relay node housed in the SSEC Data Center. This same machine hosts a rolling multi-month, realtime archive of images broadcast in the IDD Unidata-Wisconsin datastream.
IDD UNIWISC datastream continues to supply Unidata users with realtime GOES data in native projection.
Even though GOES-South imagery has successfully been incorporated into the half-hourly GOES-East image sectors in the Unidata-Wisconsin IDD datastream, it is believed that inclusion of the available 15-minute scans would be of use to Unidata community members, especially those in South America. The additions of GOES-South imager sectors to the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream will be proposed to the Unidata User's Committee in advance of its May, 2007 meeting.
A new, as yet unreleased, version, v2006, includes support for decoding of USPLN lightning data that could be made available from Embry Riddle University (active). Release of the new version awaits User Committee decisions on provision of USPLN data to Unidata community
The Unidata-developed DVB-S NOAAPORT ingest system has been in use at the UPC and several (7) Unidata sites since the NWS transition to DVB-S broadcast. At least 4 non-Unidata sites are know to be using the ingest system, but we don't spend effort tracking use.
SSEC provides and supports the Unidata DVB-S NOAAPORT ingest system for its licensed users of McIDAS-XCD. We occasionally get support questions on the NOAAPORT ingest software package, but the support burden caused by the inquiries is minimal.
The NOAAPORT ingest system installed at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica continues to function as designed. Problems, however, regularly occur as oxidation builds up in a N-connector coupling that was added by the company that re-aimed the satellite for NOAAPORT use. After the oxidation is removed by UCR personnel, data ingestion returns to normal.
This NOAAPORT reception system installation is a high profile undertaking at the UCR, so its continued success remains important for Unidata. (Yoksas)
Collaboration activities remain largely unchanged since the May 1, 2003 Policy Committee Report.
Collaborations that are most active include:
by Tom Yoksas.