The National Centers for Environmental Prediction have begun providing Fire Weather output from selected areas of the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model via Unidata's CONDUIT feed. The additional data were added into the CONDUIT feed on September 20, 2011.
The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome six new members to our governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; these terms are finishing up for four members of the Users committee and two members of the Policy committee. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting, which will take place in mid-October, 2011.
The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado for the October meeting.
The following provides a brief introduction to the scientists joining Unidata's committees. You can additional information about the governing committees, including contact information for committee members, on the Governing Committees page.
The netCDF development team has been using the Jira web tool since April; we are still refining our process to make best use of it. It has some nice charts, and allows users to comment upon, and "watch" individual issues.
The National Science Foundation is seeking to facilitate the conduct of geosciences research by supporting community-based cyberinfrastructure in an effort called EarthCube. The project is a joint effort between the NSF Geosciences Directorate and Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and seeks to greatly increase the productivity and capability of researchers and educators working at the frontiers of Earth system science.
The project team has set up an EarthCube community web site at https://earthcube.ning.com/. The goal is to create a forum that enables broad participation from the geosciences community and to solicit comments and white paper submissions to the EarthCube project.
Researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia; the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York; the department of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands; and the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom are using the IDV to help analyze environmental stresses on marine corals. The stress factors include high temperatures, ultra-violet radiation, weather systems, sedimentation, as well as stress-reducing factors such as temperature variability and tidal dynamics. Their paper Global Gradients of Coral Exposure to Environmental Stresses and Implications for Local Management, was published in the online journal PLoS One and has been featured in other scientific magazines including Nature.
According to Scott Jacobs, acting chief of the NCEP Systems Integration Branch, NCEP Central Operations (NCO) continued its integration of NAWIPS functionality into AWIPS II during August. "The main forucs is now to make the system stable and ready for forecaster testing in November," says Jacobs. "This includes collecting, decoding and storing more data types. We have emphasized getting more numerical model grid data ingested into the database."
NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) Research Data Archive (RDA) contains a large and diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, and remote sensing datasets to support atmospheric and geosciences research, along with ancillary datasets, such as topography/bathymetry, vegetation, and land use.
CISL's Data Support Section, which manages the Research Data Archive, recently announced that users of some subsets of the archived data can request files in NetCDF format.
ISU student Ryan Lueck uses the IDV to display data from ISU's THREDDS server.
The Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences maintains an extensive archive of meteorological data, including textual information (severe weather statements and other National Weather Service products), numerical model output in gempak format, gif images of weather maps created daily since 2006, and gempak-format surface and upper air data going back to 1933, much of which was provided to us by NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory. For the past year or two, we have made NMQ estimates of precipitation available on the archive as well.
