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20050908: provision of radar imagery to local TV station



>From:  Alan Czarnetzki <address@hidden>
>Organization:  University of Northern Iowa
>Keywords:  200509011932.j81JWAjo013962 IDD data

Hi Alan,

>Thanks for your help.  Alex is working to implement your suggestions.

Sounds good.

>Another question for you...
>
>Is it legal for us to take radar imagery from the IDD, process it (e.g.,
>add a logo, special notations, etc.), and then pass it on to a city cable
>system that charges subscription fees of its viewers?

Yes, this is 'legal' (legal is not the correct word, premissible is
better).  We have a web page outlining usage guidelines for data
acquired through from the UPC (typically through the IDD, but this also
covers through remote access procedures available in DODS, THREDDS, and
McIDAS ADDE:

Unidata HomePage
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu

  Data
  http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/data/index.html

    Note: Here  are guidelines for using these data. 
    http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/data/data_usage.html

In particular, the two points under the General Guidelines section
should be carefully read and appreciated:

  1. The reliability of information gained through Unidata is intended to
     be satisfactory only in an education or research context; in those
     contexts, it is assumed that outages and errors are expected and
     dealt with by the users of the data (see footnote*). These data
     are not suited for operational or decision-making uses.

  2. Unidata is funded by the National Science Foundation to support
     education and research. Therefore, the terms and conditions under
     which Unidata acquires data reflect that objective.

It is my opinion that it is incumbant upon you to inform your city
cable system of these caveats.  This is probably best done by having
them read through our data use guidelines pages.

Even though you are specifically asking about radar data (i.e., NEXRAD
data), I feel I must restate what is already on the page.  I am
reiterating these restrictions since this issue came up very recently
at another site.

There are certain data that may not be relayed/shared/etc OR displayed
outside of your institution. The best example of this is that plots of
lightning data may only be made available on your web pages as long as
access is limited to your campus.  Non-adherance to this restriction
will result in immediate cessation of provision of the datastream to
the offending site and could result in the loss of the data for the
entire Unidata community.  There are several other datastreams that
also may not be relayed:  NOGAPS model output from FNMOC; PCWS (ACARS)
data from FSL; GEM model output from the CMC; and NEXRAD Level III
products and composites received directly from WSI through the IDD WSI
feed.

>Thanks in advance for any insights on this.

No worries.

Cheers,

Tom
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