In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM. The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.
Indexed data access exposes the physical schema of datasets and makes violations of the relationship between coordinate and indices commonplace for datasets that change, such as aggregations of rolling archives. Making data requests in coordinate space will be added to the next generation of data access protocols, partly in order to solve this problem.
In the month of April NCEP Central Operations (NCO) delivered an updated version of the AWIPS II National Center Perspective (NCP) and an initial version of NSHARP to both the NWS Office of Science and Technology and Raytheon Technical Services, reports NCO Chief of Systems Integration Michelle Mainelli.
"The NCP will be baselined in the primary AWIPS II software in May and released to test sites across the NWS by late May or early June," says Mainelli. "This version of the software will be the first release to include the full NAWIPS migrated code and functionality."
When model data is encoded in GRIB, the dataset schema is lost. So is an unambiguous identification of the the schema variables. To deal with these problems, GRIB reading libraries probably make assumptions that may not be valid for all datasets.
Problems with external tables make BUFR/GRIB not suitable as long-term storage formats. To solve this, there must be a foolproof way for reading software to know what tables the writing software used, and there must be an authoritative registry of tables.
