Unidata Users Committee Meeting Summary
June 20, 1997
(Draft)


Participants:

Members: Visitors: Mohan Ramamurthy (Chair) Mary Marlino David Dempsey David Knight UPC Staff: Michael Morgan Charles Murphy Sally Bates Melanie Wetzel Steve Chiswell Ethan Davis Ben Domenico Ex-Officio Members: Linda Miller Dan Vietor, ATAC Don Murray Sandra Nilsson Mike Schmidt Tom Yoksas

Administrative Matters

The next meeting date was proposed for 13-14 October, 1997. Several UserComm members were absent so the date has not been confirmed.

Action 1 from the Action Items was deferred until the October meeting. This action pertained to announcing the UserComm meetings to the community and soliciting community input for the meeting.

Sandra Nilsson responded to Action 5 indicating that the follow up with WSI about access to NIDS data at 4 hour delays, rather than 48 hour delays was unsuccessful. WSI contends that data used for research and education should not be hampered by such a delay.

Mary Marlino said that a UserComm representative would be welcome at the Program for Advancement of Geophysical Education (PAGE) meetings. The PAGE program was renamed from the GREATT program.

Tom Yoksas provided an overview of the platform independent issues and future directions of Unidata. The plan as proposed in the Unidata Five-Year Proposal to the NSF details the development of a Java application that incorporates the current applications and makes them available to the Unidata community. He addressed the resolutions and actions from the March 13-14 meeting.

Discussion:

The UserComm should play a role in defining timelines toward building capabilities incrementally toward the JAVA based Geosif (see Unidata: 2003 Proposal to National Science Foundation)

Charlie Murphy suggested that there should be a sub-committee created of 4-8 people to represent the Unidata community to define the capabilities for the early design phase of the project. This generated much discussion on methods to be used for collecting community reaction and input for the future.

Among suggestions for collecting community input were:

It was agreed that a large portion of the next UserComm meeting will be devoted to the topic of the steps to be taken to provide input to the UPC toward the Geosif and Java development.

Mohan Ramamurthy gave a summary from the Unidata Policy Committee meeting. Unidata Policy Committee Action 2 (The Unidata users Committee needs to articulate the needs of the Unidata community for NEXRAD data streams, both currently and in the foreseeable future). This Action was tabled until the next Users Committee meeting.

Steve Chiswell provided a de-briefing on Unidata solutions to satellite data reception problems at some sites.

The majority of the meeting was spent on workshop coordination issues.

Questions or comments can be sent to lmiller@unidata.ucar.edu

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