The Unidata Program Center has received a commendation from the National Weather Service's Spaceflight Meteorology Group, thanking the program for providing the Local Data Manger software and technical support for both the LDM and McIDAS packages. Over the course of the Space Shuttle program, the LDM was used to transport observational and experimental data from a variety of sources, including the NWS and the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center.
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 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.
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.
The Unidata Program Center will be moving into the Anthes building.
The Unidata Program Center has spiffy new lodgings.
Update: Our move to the new building is (more or less) complete. Come by and visit us in our snazzy (if temporary) new building.
It's only temporary, and it's only across the street, but the Program Center offices (along with the offices of most of the programs that make up the UCAR Community Programs — UCP) will be moving to new digs during the week of August 8, 2011. As a result, we may be slow to respond to phone calls and e-mail support questions during the transition. If all goes according to plan, we'll be in the new space beginning on Monday, August 15th.
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.
WSI Corporation and Unidata are pleased to announce the availability of global lightning data to members of the Unidata community.
WSI Corp.'s Global Lightning Network (GLN) provides high quality real-time and archive lightning stroke data to clients throughout the world. Lightning sensors are located at more than 150 international hosting partner sites, in addition to the detectors that make up the North American Precision Lightning Network (all NAPLN data is included in the GLN data feed). In the key deployment areas, including North and South America, Europe, and Asia/Australia, GLN detection efficiency values are as high as 90-95%, with corresponding location accuracies less than 1 km. Real-time data are collected in a 1-minute bin, and contain cloud-to-ground lightning stroke data and some cloud flash discharges.
