MEMORANDUM

This report is intended to provide the Board with a brief summary of new activities that have taken place since the October 1999 status report (http://www.uop.ucar.edu/botoct99.html). The report begins with a short summary of key changes by the three UOP goal areas (http://www.uop.ucar.edu).

PAGE has received funding for a proposal entitled, A Virtual Exploratorium to Support Inquiry-Based Learning in Geoscience Courses. The goal of this effort is to design and develop learner-centered scientific and modeling tools and data sets relevant to geoscience phenomenon. The project was presented at the AMS meeting in Long Beach and the community response was extremely positive.

COMET has begun producing narrated slide presentations that can be viewed over the Web using new streaming technologies. Two of these projects, Predicting Supercell Motion Using Hodograph Techniques and The Use and Misuse of Conditional Symmetric Instability, are now on-line (http://www.meted.ucar.edu). Initial feedback from users on the effectiveness of this new training format has been very positive, citing the shorter, more concise nature of the Webcasts as a nice fit for on-station training.

In 1999, data delivery from JOSS' CODIAC data system was substantially higher than any previous year and JOSS provided the latest version of CODIAC to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. Other CODIAC developments included new software to aid in plotting scientific data on CODIAC and manage increased data volumes and hardware upgrades to accommodate increasing computational/storage demands.

UNAVCO`s primary NSF funding has been renewed for four years after an extremely favorable peer view and site visit . The new grant will run one year longer than the present 3-year grant, and provides a 13% per year increase. Many scientists in the UNAVCO community and facility staff contributed to the proposal.

Unidata is participating in discussion for a collaborative endeavor to provide raw (Level II) data to universities. This effort is an extension of the current Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT).

UNAVCO is now conducting equipment tests in preparation for selection of a GPS equipment manufacturer for use in the SuomiNet program. We expect to receive a report on the equipment testing by April 2000, allowing the first equipment purchase to commence in May 2000. So far, 41 sites are committed, including 26 sites outside of the U.S.

PAGE has begun a joint effort with a broad range of geoscience organizations to develop a Geoscience Digital Library. This work is intended to be a major cornerstone in the NSF Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Digital Library effort.

Constellation Observing System For Meteorology, Ionosphere, And Climate (COSMIC).

The COSMIC update will be provided during the Board Executive Session (http:\\www.cosmic.ucar.edu).

UOP Funding remains strong at over $36 million in FY98 and FY99. Funding is expected to remain at this level.

www.comet.ucar.edu

10^th Anniversary Celebration. On 11 January 2000, COMET celebrated its 10^th anniversary, at a reception held in Long Beach, California. Since COMET's inception, 210 hours of interactive multimedia instruction have been created, over 240 weeks of courses have been offered, and over 150 collaborative research projects involving 70 university faculty and 66 NWS forecast offices have been funded. One byproduct of the program has been the creation of over 15,000 graphic images and animations, an incredibly valuable resource to the community. COMET is currently working with the National Science Foundation, NESDIS, and the NWS to develop an on-line database that will allow instructors and forecasters all over the country to access and download images that can support their instructional projects.

Training. COMET training activities since October include:

• Satellite Meteorology Module. Produced with funding by the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), the web-based Polar Satellite Products for the Operational Forecaster: Case Studies module was released in December, 1999, (http://www.meted.ucar.edu). This module was the third in a series of four Web modules demonstrating how to use Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) data in forecasts. A fourth module on the use of POES sounding products is in production.

• Aviation Weather Training for Forecasters. A new professional development series, Forecasting Low-Altitude Clouds and Fog for Aviation Operations, has been initiated. The first Web module in this series, Radiation Fog, was published in December, 1999, (http://www.meted.ucar.edu). Content for a second module, Advection/Coastal Fog, is being researched. The Aviation Weather Training Program (separate from the above module effort) was disbanded in October of 1999 due to funding constraints.

• NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction). Several new training modules were released as part of an ongoing effort to improve operational use of NWP products (http://www.meted.ucar.edu):

• Impact of Model Numerics on Weather Depiction, was released in November, 1999, and provides fundamental information on numerical model designs.

• Characteristics of Operational NWP Models is now online with several areas fully developed. It will be further developed over the year, and then updated on a regular basis.

• Effects of NWP Cloud Precipitation Processes on Model Forecasts, is nearing completion.

• Webcasts To broaden the range of training modes, the COMET Program has begun producing narrated slide presentations that can be viewed over the Web using new streaming technologies. Initial feedback from users on the effectiveness of this new training format has been very positive, citing the shorter, more concise nature of the Webcasts as a nice fit for on-station training. The COMET Program expects to produce several more presentations in various subject areas during the year and to experiment in producing live Webcasts of COMET classroom presentations. Two of these projects, Predicting Supercell Motion Using Hodograph Techniques and The Use and Misuse of Conditional Symmetric Instability, are now on-line (http://www.meted.ucar.edu).

• Classroom Upgrades. In November 1999, the ten aging Hewlett Packard (HP) 755 workstations were replaced with HP C3000 workstations. These new workstations allow for much faster manipulation of analysis and display packages, most notably the NWS's AWIPS software. A number of other classroom upgrades will be accomplished in the coming months, including replacement of the Pentium PCs with state-of-the-art dual processor machines. In addition, an upgrade to the sound system is being researched to allow higher quality capture of classroom presentations for Webcasting.

www.joss.ucar.edu

Field Operations and Data Management. These activities provide program planning and design, site surveys, field operation logistics, and management and data management (including system design and the collection, quality control, formatting and customized delivery of scientific project data). Since the October report, a few of these activities include:

• CASES-99. Provided operation and logistics support as well as data management functions for the Cooperative Atmospheric Surface Exchange Study 1999 (CASES-99). CASES field phase occurred October 1999 with the study area centered on the Walnut River Watershed near Wichita, KS. JOSS staff traveled to the field and provided forecast support for day-to-day operations.
• CODIAC. CODIAC's data delivery in 1999 substantially exceeded any previous year. Development in CODIAC in FY1999 included providing the latest version of CODIAC to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina; development of new software to aid in plotting scientific data on CODIAC; substantial hardware upgrades and additions to accommodate increasing computational/storage demands; and development of software improvements to manage volumes of data now handled through CODIAC.
• MAP. JOSS Staff was responsible for the U.S. Project Office for the Mesoscale Alpine Program (MAP), September-November, 1999, headed by J. Kuettner. The MAP intensive field phase observations during September-November 1999 covered the general area of the Alps Mountains. The primary MAP Operations Center (MOC) was located in Innsbruck, Austria; a Project Operations Center (POC) to support the coordination of operations between airborne and ground-based Doppler radars was located at Milan-Linate (Italy) Airport. JOSS staff supported the aircraft operations at both the MOC and POC.
• EPIC2001. In support of the Equatorial Pacific Investigations of Climate (EPIC2001), JOSS carried out a site survey in southwestern Mexico (Bahias de Huatulco) and prepared a site survey report for submission to NSF and NOAA. The survey concluded that operational requirements in support of the field phase could be accommodated by facilities available at the Huatulco airport. JOSS will continue to support the field operational requirements of EPIC2001 with a site survey planned for March 2000. Note: not clear how the second survey differs from the first
• ACE-Asia. A JOSS site survey concluded that Iwakuni, Japan could support the operational requirements of the Asian Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE-Asia).
• Future Field Programs. JOSS staff have participated in early planning activities for future projects (2000 and beyond) involving the Pan American Climate Studies Eastern Pacific Field Program (PACS 2000), THORPEX, and CLIVAR/GOALS programmatic planning.

Program Support. JOSS works with government agencies, national and international institutions, and scientists to provide various types of logistics support to the academic research community. Eleven Boulder and 34 off-site JOSS staff members provide this support.

• Project Support. In the first quarter of FY2000, the JOSS Program Support Group (PSG) supported over 700 academic community members attending 160 planning, organizing, oversight meetings, workshops, conferences, and field research experiments.

• On-site Support. On-site support was provided to scientific meetings, including:

• OCE Decadal Planning Project;
• DEOS (Deep Earth Observatories on the Seafloor);
• ENSO – El Niño Southern Oscillation project meetings;
• CLIVAR – Climate Variability and Predictability project meetings;
• Worldwide Climate and Health Workshops.

www.unidata.ucar.edu

Russell L. DeSouza Award. Last spring, the Unidata Users Committee selected Harold J.Edmon (University of Washington) to be the first recipient of the Russell L. DeSouza award for Outstanding Community Service. Edmon's involvement in Unidata reaches back to before the program's formal start in June of 1983, and he has continued to assist the program in numerous capacities ever since. A summary of Edmon's contributions, and an explanation of the award itself, was published in the Summer/Fall 1999 issue of the Unidata Newsletter and will be posted shortly on Unidata's Web server (www.unidata.ucar.edu). The formal award certificate was presented to Edmon during a special session on Unidata at this year's annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Long Beach, California.

CRAFT Extension. Unidata is participating in discussion for a collaborative endeavor to provide raw (Level II) data to universities. This effort is an extension of the current Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT), whose participants are:

• Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the University of Oklahoma,
• University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Science,
• Unidata.

The National Center for Environment Precipitation (NCEP) and Abilene project (a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) are also participating in these discussions.

Java-based Applications. Unidata also is continuing its development of new Java-based meteorological applications. Prototypes of an interactive skew-T/hodograph, a surface-observation viewer and a gridded-data viewer have been released and are being tested by members of Unidata's MetApps taskforce.

New Staff. Since the last Board meeting, Unidata has added two staff members and has initiated the process of bringing them up to speed. This should allow the program to develop the next generation of its two flagship products: the Local Data Manager (LDM), and the netCDF (for storing scientific data).

www.page.ucar.edu

In July, PAGE received notice that two major proposals had been approved for funding:

• The Virtual Exploratorium. "A Virtual Exploratorium to Support Inquiry-Based Learning in Geoscience Courses" was funded by the NSF to support work to develop a new learning model, and to design and develop learner-centered scientific and modeling tools, a series of data sets of relevant geoscience phenomena, and an integrated virtual encyclopedia of basic scientific concepts. PAGE will also offer support to faculty seeking to incorporate these tools into their courses. Community response to the project, which was presented at the AMS meeting in Long Beach, has been extremely positive. We have identified an El Nino model to be used, and are in the process of designing the instructional framework of the Exploratorium. We plan to demonstrate a prototype to the Board at the October meeting.
• Geoscience Digital Library (GDL). NSF has funded a second major proposal, the development of a "Geoscience Digital Library". This is a collaborative proposal between UCAR and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), and includes primary investigators from the Keck Geology Consortium, the Earth System Science Education (ESSE) program of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), the Center for Life Long Learning and Design (L3D), of the University of Colorado, and the Alexandria Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
  
  A software engineer is on board conducting user exercises and requirements exercises for the development and design of the systems architecture. A community steering committee called the Digital Library for Earth System Education, (http://www.dlese.org) has been established at UCAR to provide oversight and guidance for this effort. Numerous community briefings on the project have been made, and subcommittees related to this effort have been formed for collections, services, and technical oversight. This work is intended to be a major cornerstone in the NSF Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Digital Library.

www.gst.ucar.edu

SuomiNet. UNAVCO is now conducting equipment tests in preparation for selection of a manufacturer of GPS equipment for use in the SuomiNet program. We expect to receive a report on the equipment testing by April 2000, allowing the first equipment purchase to commence in May 2000. Universities have registered 170 sites for participation in SuomiNet. A total of 26 sites have been registered outside of the U.S., including sites in Africa, China, Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Greenland, Guam, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Russia, and Taiwan.

UNAVCO. Following extremely favorable peer view and a very successful site visit, UNAVCO`s primary NSF funding has been renewed for four years. The new grant will run one year longer than the present 3-year one, and provide a 13% per year increase. Many scientists in the UNAVCO community and facility staff contributed to the proposal. The outcome showed that the UNAVCO community is doing first-rate GPS-related science, and that UNAVCO as an organization and facility are doing an excellent job of supporting that science.

www.vsp.ucar.edu

www.iita.ucar.edu

DODS project management is the major focus of the IITA program. Development of the Distributed Oceanographic Data System (DODS) and awareness in the science community of the DODS data transport mechanism are maturing. A number of major external science projects and information technology facilities are connecting with the project in one, or more, of the following ways:

• Recommending using the DODS protocol (e.g., JGOFS, POGO)
• Installing DODS data servers (e.g., NASA Federation members, NASA DAACs, NCAR HAO, PMEL, NOAA CDC)
• Developing core software (e.g., NCAR HAO)
• Developing science community-specific DODS clients (NCAR HAO, PMEL, George Mason University)

In partnership with the American Geophysical Union, exploring online, electronic publishing, the DODS management office at IITA represents and demonstrates DODS, in the AGU booth, at all AGU-sponsored conferences. In addition, the management office represents the DODS project and its software capabilities to the NASA Federation, composed of 33 Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPs) from the university, government and commercial sectors. With support from the UOP office, IITA DODS project management organizes the semi-annual DODS meetings, last held in October 99 at the University of Rhode Island.