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20020424: INFO REQUEST



>From: Tom Grzelak <address@hidden>
>Organization: Rutgers
>Keywords: 200204242131.g3OLV7a18780 IDD data

Tom,

Jeff Weber probably already got back to you on other things in your
note.  I am responding to your inquiry about higher resolution
satellite imagery.

>With the support of Rutgers University's Center for Environmental 
>Prediction, we are making a concerted effort to promote the use of 
>meteorological data within the classroom and for research.

Excellent.  The data available to Unidata particpants is priceless.
It is always encouraging to learn of new/renewed efforts to get
more people using it for something other than wallpaper.

>As part of this 
>effort, I need to determine EVERYTHING that is available via IDD whether it 
>be the standard feeds (MCIDAS) or specialized, subscribed feeds (NLDN), 
>etc.

Good luck!  This has been one of the mysteries about weather data for
as long as I can remember.  The number of people who actually know what
is in all the various streams is probably not more than a handful.  The
documentation for what should be there and what is actually there is
sparse.  If you do generate a knowledge base on what really is being
delivered, it would be a service to the entire community to let other
people benefit from your work.

All of this may be a bit of an overstatement, but not by much.

>Basically, I need to assess what is available via IDD and make those 
>capabilities known to all of the Rutgers community.
>
>Can you point me in the right direction on how to obtain all of this 
>information?

Hopefully, by now Jeff has pointed you at some resources that are
available.  My diatribe above was meant to warn you that those
resources are anything but complete.

>For example, do we have any other sources of real-time satellite data 
>deliverable via IDD/LDM other than MCIDAS?  I have researchers here who 
>could really make use of IR/VIS NE US satellite data of 1km or less 
>resolution.  Is there a source for this data?

There are sources for higher resolution satellite data, but not
typically through the IDD.  NOAAPORT has two channels of remapped GOES
sectors that are used by the NWS forecast offices around the country.
We ingest those channels in Boulder and make the products available
generally by remote access through McIDAS ADDE.  Since each of the
NOAAPORT channels containing satellite imagery is capable of carrying a
T1's worth of data (they are not totally full, so this is an upper
limit), a site would need to be able to intest 2 T1's worth of data on
top of all or the other data that they are already getting if they
wanted to feed this through the IDD.  Our opinion is that the number of
sites that are capable of doing this is very small.

Given this, and given even larger satellite datasets that are becoming
available, we decided to setup a collection of community data servers
that would have the full set of imagery like this (and more) and have
them make the data available on demand in a "pull" fashion.  McIDAS
ADDE provides this very nicely for satellite imagery (and POINT and
GRID data also).  Two of the community server sites, Plymouth State
College in New Hampshire, and the University of Georgia, have their own
NOAAPORT reception systems.  They do not have to have a huge pipe into
their site to get all of the imagery in NOAAPORT channels 1 & 2.  Three
of the other community server sites, the NSF in Washington, D.C., the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and CU/CIRES get all of the imagery
from the Unidata top-level relay machine, thelma.  The other machine
that gets all and then hosts the imagery through ADDE is
motherlode.ucar.edu.

To get an idea of what the satellite imagery in NOAAPORT looks like,
you should check out the very nice web page that Jim Koermer of
Plymouth State put together:

Plymouth State College
http://www.plymouth.edu

  Weather Center
  http://vortex.plymouth.edu/

    Make Your Own ...
    http://vortex.plymouth.edu/make.html

    McIDAS GINI 

    1-km Composites 

The McIDAS GINI link will take you to a page where you can specify
which sector you want to load, the center point for where you want it
loaded, and the blow-up/blow-down factor for the load.

I included a reference to the 1-km Composites (found under NEXRAD
products) to let you know about the composites that we (Unidata) are
making and sending in the FNEXRAD feed.  We will be announcing these
products as soon as I can finish a McIDAS addendum and make it
available (should be this coming week).

The other thing that will be happening is that we will be running yet
another community data server on a Sun Enterprise 450 that is being
installed in the SSEC Data Center.  We are planning on making as much
GOES data available on this machine as we can.  The data there will not
be remapped as the sectors in NOAAPORT are.

In addition, we continue to look for opportunities to access more,
higher resolution data on machines operated by folks around the country
and world.  The project aimed at making all of the data that can be
served by community participants has been dubbed THREDDS.  You may have
read about THREDDS in one or more Unidata Newsletter articles in the
past.  This effort is well underway and has been providing data on
demand to the new Unidata display/analysis development project,
MetApps, a project that you may also have heard of previously.

>Thanks!

Again, what data will be available to sites continues to increase, so
the job of cataloging it continues to become more formidable.  Part of
THREDDS deals with the metadata needed to make data made available by
the community servers.  This will, in some ways help you in your effort
of learning about all of the data that is available, but it will never
be complete unless community members pitch in and help.

I hope that this has helped somewhat and not contributed to any
confusion.

Tom Yoksas