Unidata Newsletter, December 2007

CommuniteE-Letter	Volume 4, Number 7, November/December 2007

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San Francisco's most recognizable landmark will be on display when Unidata Staff and community members head to the city by the bay. See article.

Photo Credit: Unidata Staff

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At AMS: Experience On-Demand, Dynamically Adaptive Interaction with Weather

Rich Clark, Millersville University

LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) is an emerging paradigm shift away from observing and prediction systems that operate in fixed configurations, on fixed schedules largely independent of weather, to one that can change configuration dynamically in response to the evolving weather. LEAD has developed a technology-based infrastructure to allow scientists, students, tools, and sensors to interact with weather.

LEAD developers will offer a workshop at the AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January. This workshop is intended to expose university faculty and students to LEAD's cyberinfrastructure environment by providing participants with the opportunity to work with the tools developed and implemented by the project team.

Entering through the LEAD gateway portal, participants will find access to multiple data types, employ a Google-map type tool for searching, accessing, downloading, and visualizing data from a data index catalog, invoke intelligent data mining algorithms to search for phenomena of interest, assimilate data for data-driven workflows, build their own experiments, launch a WRF run, monitor its progress, save the output file in their personal workspace, and view it using Unidata's 3-D IDV visualization software. Participants will also be introduced to guided, inquiry-based educational modules that use LEAD capabilities to enable user interaction.

The workshop will be divided into three parts. Following a very brief overview to provide context, instructors will immediately begin with hands-on use of the system, since we want participants to experience a variety of LEAD technologies, including the ability to launch a WRF run during this half-day event. The second part of the workshop will take place while the WRF jobs are running. It will focus on LEAD as a new paradigm for research and education in the atmospheric sciences. Finally, in the last hour of the workshop, participants will go to their personal workspace to access and visualize the results.

Enrollment for the AMS workshop is limited to 24 individuals. Our aim is to democratize and build interest in LEAD within the university community; thus, we are particularly interested in seeking broad representation from faculty and students from graduate and undergraduate programs across institutions, large and small. Breadth and diversity will be considered in the selection of participants.

The LEAD Workshop is supported by an NSF-funded Large ITR grant, and there is no registration fee for participants. Registration to the workshop will be coordinated via e-mail. on a first-come, first-served basis, will not be available on-site. To register, please contact Dr. Richard Clark, Department of Earth Sciences, P.O. Box 1002, Millersville University, Millersville, PA 17551. Tel: 717-872-3930.

Unidata at the AGU

Look for Unidata at the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting, 10–14 December 2007, Monday–Friday. Staff are participating on several levels that include paper and poster presentations and chairing sessions. The Earth and Space Science Informatics session inaugurated by Unidata and co-convenors as Cyberinfrastructure for Earth Systems Science several years ago continues this year. Plan to stop by the UCAR Office of Programs booth space 616 to bring yourself up to date on the UOP and Unidata and new or continuing activities. Staff from all UOP programs will be in the booth at different times to meet you and to answer your questions. Here's a link to the schedule of Unidata-related presentations by staff and by community members as well.

DeSouza Award

In the near future the Users Committee will be soliciting nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award. We invite you to begin considering names to submit for the nomination. The award's namesake embodied all of the attributes we look for in each recipient: energy and expertise, while recognizing outstanding service to the Unidata community. Traditionally the award has been presented at the AMS Annual Meeting prior to the IIIPS symposium. In 2008, however, there will a change in venue. The award recipient will join the Unidata Users Committee at its spring meeting in Boulder during April. Unidata will webcast the award presentation so the entire community can tune in, and we will ask the recipient to provide a short seminar on his/her Unidata community activities. You will find more information at this link.

Chiz the Whiz

It is with enormously mixed emotions that we will say farewell to Steve Chiswell, who will be leaving the Program Center in mid-January. While we are happy for Chiz, who's leaving to follow his heart by returning back to his scientific roots, we are saddened by the departure of a dear and highly valued colleague.

Steve is not only a jack of all trades but is also the master of each. In addition to his primary role as Unidata's point person for GEMPAK development and support to a large user base, a non-trivial job in itself, Chiz has played pivotal roles in a number of other Unidata projects, including CONDUIT, LDM/IDD, NOAAPort data ingest, and local mesoscale modeling. As such, Chiz leaves empty some big shoes to fill.

Recognizing the importance to the community of the work Chiz does, Unidata management is taking immediate steps to provide a smooth and orderly transition of many of his responsibilities to other UPC staff while the search for a new staff member is in progress.

Happy Holidays

Please send comments to support-eletter@unidata.ucar.edu
The CommuniteE-letter is produced by editor, Jo Hansen, and production manager, Tina Campbell