McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, Satellite Data Ingest Status Report
Spring/Summer/Fall 2010

McIDAS

The use of McIDAS in the U.S. educational community remains largely unchanged since the last User Committee meeting in Spring 2010. We estimate that approximately 40 U.S. and international educational sites are actively using Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD.

• Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009 was originally released on July 10, 2009; 6 updates have been issued to date throught an addendum process.

  Unidata McIDAS-X/-XCD v2009f is an addendum upgrade to v2009, and it includes all bugfixes/modifications/additions made available in the SSEC v2010.1 release. It was decided to not follow the SSEC lead in renaming releases to match the year (e.g., v2010.1 for the initial release in 2010) because any/all changes to McIDAS are minor in nature. This decision lessens the effort needed to support documentation since version numbers don't need to be updated, etc.

• The UPC continues to receive requests for McIDAS from international university users and U.S. government agencies and other non-traditional Unidata users (e.g., private businesses, etc.). Government agencies and non-traditional Unidata users are referred to UW/SSEC for access to McIDAS; international educational community user requests are granted on a case-by-case basis after they provide a clear statement of their acceptance of the terms of use provided by SSEC.

• The UPC (Yoksas) actively participates in the McIDAS Advisory Committee (MAC). The MAC was assembled by UW/SSEC to advise SSEC on McIDAS-X users needs/concerns/desires for development in the next generation McIDAS, McIDAS-V. The next MAC meeting will be held in advance of the 2010 McIDAS Users Group (MUG) meeting in Madison, WI on October 24, 2010.

ldm-mcidas

• The ldm-mcidas package of decoders for IDD-conveyed data not supported by McIDAS-XCD remains unchanged since its last release in spring, 2009 (no new releases have been needed since the data decoded by the package essentially remain unchanged).

Satellite Data Ingest

• Unidata-ingested GOES-10 and GOES-East imager data was integrated in Unidata-Wisconsin GOES-East composite image sectors beginning January 31, 2007. South America coverage from GOES-10 was lost when GOES-10 was decommissioned on December 1, 2009. It was restored when NOAA repurposed GOES-12 (previously GOES-East) to South American surveillance in May, 2010.

  Direct, programmatic access to real-time GOES-10 data via McIDAS ADDE spurred use by over 450 users in 33 countries who downloaded an average of 615 GB of data per month. Notably, over 1 TB of data was downloaded per month during the 2008/9 South American tropical wet season by a wide variety of users including NCAR/EOL for support of the Variability of American Monsoon Systems Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study Regional Experiment. Active access to all GOES data ingested by Unidata using SSEC's McIDAS SDI continues.

Relevant Metrics

• Internet2 (I2) bandwidth usage by the McIDAS ADDE protocol routinely exceed 1 TB/week. This ranks second in Advanced Applications behind the LDM.

  Weekly I2 usage statistics can be seen at Internet NetFlow: Weekly Reports (search for 'McIDAS' usage statistics in the Advanced Applications portion of Table 7).

• McIDAS Inquiry Metrics

by Tom Yoksas.