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Since the 1980s, the NSF Unidata program has partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) to provide access to and support for SSEC’s Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS). For nearly 30 years, the Program has maintained and supported a modified version of the McIDAS-X package tailored to the needs of academic users. This post describes the current circumstances surrounding our distribution of McIDAS-X and lays out our planned future actions in support of university users of the software.

NSF Unidata’s Relationship with SSEC

The NSF Unidata Program has had a long and productive relationship with SSEC; the two programs have supported each other in order to distribute Earth Systems Science data and create software tools to store and analyze those data. As a part of that ongoing relationship, NSF Unidata has served as a conduit for McIDAS software to the university community.

McIDAS software is licensed to members of the McIDAS User’s Group (MUG). The MUG has been in existence since 1989 as a subscription-based membership group that pools its subscription fees to pay for the maintenance and upgrades of McIDAS software and documentation. In order to reduce costs and enhance access to McIDAS in the university community, NSF Unidata and the SSEC created an arrangement whereby NSF Unidata maintained a MUG membership, and was allowed to redistribute the software. Specifically, NSF Unidata is allowed to redistribute McIDAS-X to individuals who are from a US degree-granting educational institution (and have a .EDU email address associated with their institution) or to other users (including commercial entities) who are themselves members of the MUG. The burden of technical support for university users who received the software from NSF Unidata would fall on the Program itself, rather than on the SSEC. 

In addition to providing technical support for McIDAS-X, NSF Unidata technical staff created an NSF Unidata McIDAS-X distribution package, which combines SSEC's McIDAS-X and McIDAS-XCD packages and contains numerous modifications that add functionality. (McIDAS-XCD is the decoding package for data products delivered via NOAAPort.) 

McIDAS Development at the Program Center

Since late 2023, the NSF Unidata Program Center has not had personnel on staff with expertise in McIDAS-X development. In consultation with our advisory committees, we made the decision to focus the remaining development resources on other visualization packages, including the IDV, AWIPS, and MetPy.

Because both the number of users requesting support and the rate of change in the McIDAS-X package itself are low, this situation did not cause any immediate hiccups. NSF Unidata McIDAS-X version 2023 — the most recent NSF Unidata release — is still available to university users. However, we are no longer in a position to either release updates (even bug fixes) or provide technical support for the package.

What This Means for the Community

While the NSF Unidata Program Center can no longer create new releases of our version of McIDAS-X, we intend to maintain the Program Center’s MUG membership, allowing us to continue to:

  • Provide access to version 2023 of NSF Unidata McIDAS-X to those who meet the criteria outlined above.
  • Provide access to data hosted on the Program Center’s ADDE servers. (ADDE is part of the McIDAS-X package.)

In addition, while the Program Center will no longer offer direct technical support, we will continue to host the mcidas-x mailing list, providing a space where community members can gather to ask questions and support each other.

For those looking to transition from using McIDAS-X to other tools supported by the NSF Unidata Program, we suggest considering the following options:

IDV (or McIDAS-V)

NSF Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and SSEC’s McIDAS-V are freely available 3D geoscience visualization and analysis tools based on the same core technologies. While the two packages do differ in their exact capabilities, they are broadly similar and capable of accessing and displaying data from the same types of sources, including McIDAS ADDE servers.

AWIPS

NSF Unidata supports a version of the National Weather Service’s Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) tailored for use by the university community. There is significant overlap between the functionality of the AWIPS and McIDAS-X packages.

MetPy

NSF Unidata’s MetPy is a collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing calculations with weather data. While MetPy does not have a graphical user interface, it does support the same types of analysis and display operations McIDAS-X is generally used for.

Other Free and Open Source Options

In addition, a number of other open source tools not supported by NSF Unidata are available. The following list is not exhaustive, but these packages may be worth investigating, depending on your needs and situation:

If you have questions about access to the current version of NSF Unidata McIDAS-X, please contact support@unidata.ucar.edu. If you have questions about using McIDAS-X, consider posting on the mcidas-x mailing list.