**Strategic Advisory Committee Members:**
Bill Gallus, Iowa State University, Chair
Jennifer Collins, University of South Florida
Steve Lazarus, Florida Institute of Technology
Brian Mapes, University of Miami
Lynn McMurdie, University of Washington
David Santek, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Kevin Tyle, University at Albany
Sepi Yalda, Millersville University
**NSF Representative**
Bernard Grant
**UPC Staff Attending**
Ethan Davis
Terry Mitchell-Sur
Mohan Ramamurthy
Josh Young
Meeting Agenda
HDF/NetCDF use opposite conventions, netCDF handles it one certain way and hdf another way. They both have an automatic setting and some libraries allow you to change the setting if knowledgable.
October 6th and 7th selected as meeting date with the caveat that Bill Gallus will be on sabbatical all Fall and Steven Lazarus will serve as the alternate or proxy chair.
Earthcube-UCAR’s proposal is being recommended for award. Programmatic terms and conditions have been written.The cooperative agreement will be issued after the award letter is issued by DGA.Additionally, the EarthCube netCDF-CF award has been made with Ethan Davis as PI. Committee members should also be aware of the Revserse Site Visit report issued since the last committee meeting (available here).
Staffing report: Unidata will begin the search for a new System Administrator and Ben Domenico will retire in 2016. We will likely hire one and possibly two Software Engineers before the end of the calendar year. We also had our first Community Services intern start recently with a term extending into fall. Two technical interns starting this May for the summer from Millersville University and Northern Illinois University.
Questions/Comments:
Cloud Efforts
Community Equipment Awards
With our increased effort at securing non-core funding paying off, we are in a good financial position half way through FY16. As we pursue and expand our non core funding throughout the year, it will continue to play a big part of thefinancial picture this year and next as we anticipate level funding for the core in FY16 and possibly FY17. Three of the five EarthCube projects end this fiscal year, while two other major non core projects are also set to end in FY16. Although there is no salary and benefits as part of the award, we've secured the funding for the GOES-R project a couple of weeks ago, which also positions us favorably for the end of FY16. We will continue to carefully monitor our financials and adjust non labor expenses like travel as necessary. We will also continue to encourage staff to regularly use their PTO, where those funds come from the UCAR benefits pool, in order to hit our budgeted work effort of 85%. We will continue to pursue funding opportunities wherever and whenever possible in an effort to move the program forward.
2017 Budget-Many cross foundational investments focused on:
Strong push for Foundation wide initiatives including Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) and Prediction of and Resilience against Extreme EVENTS (PREEVENTS) with funding over 6 years.
Broadening Participation is being strongly emphasized such as Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners that have been Underrepresented for Diversity in Engineering and Sciences (INCLUDES) $15M for NSF and $2.44M in GEO; preproposal due 4/15/16
Will moving Rebecca Hacker to NCAR at least part-time help improve education at NCAR (Bern Grant)?
Rebecca’s move is viewed favorably, as at least a possible bridge between UCP and NCAR
There was no ability to measure what NCAR (separate from UCAR) was doing in the area of science education.
Have other agencies received the order to pursue funding from non-traditional (corporate) resources? Yes for both University of Wisconsin and University of Washington.
Every 5 years a survey, followed by Strategic Plan, then a new draft, start the conversation and decide process. During 2011 two representatives from the committees attended to a two day meeting in Boulder to brainstorm with staff. Possibly two committee members will travel to UPC in the June time frame, followed by virtual meetings in July and later.
EarthCube’s All Hands Meeting will take place July 6-8 in Denver, large gathering of community including all of the funded projects
CF NetCDF Will proceed with a workshop to be held on May 24-May 26, 25-30 attendees; satellite swath data is part of the discussion; EU and Australia also attending. GOES-R spectral specialist attending, ensemble is unresolved and in scope. Charlie Zender will be attending and ensemble is an area of interest for him. A number of folks attending are also interested in unstructured grids.
In response to the the most recent EarthCube Solicitation, Unidata collaborated with two partners on proposal. 1) Brian Mapes focused on notebooks and producing beautiful IDV notebooks and providing easy clickable examples. 2) Unidata was requested to partner on developing the architecture for EarthCube; this came about at least partly because of Mohan’s role chairing the CDF. Member facilities of CDF will need to be able to integrate into any System of Systems developed for EarthCube. Unidata’s role is gathering requirements from the user community to ensure those standards are incorporated into the larger EarthCube framework. One condition of Mohan’s ESSO submission is the ability to continue to submit technology and development projects. NSF does not view such submissions as a conflict of interest. Additionally, three other EarthCube projects are ending this year after a NCE.
Reverse Site Visit consisted of 7 high-level GEO community member. Atmospheric science had two representatives; as an advisory group they were not making decisions but instead providing feedback on how to proceed.
First comment focused on definition of EarthCube, including a clear articulation of what is EarthCube. EarthCube has funded about 30 projects over the last three years but as of yet there is no plan in place to stitch those capabilities together along with other facilities such as NCAR, OOI, Joides Resolution, etc.
Second goal: Transition to an Leadership Council empowered governance model, due to doubt regarding the bottom up model that treats the entire community as equal.
Questions were raised about EarthCube’s budget which Mohan noted was about $14M/year for the program as a whole.
3rd recommendation concerned system of systems. The Leadership Council has made the most progress in responding to this issue from the Reverse Site Visit.
4th recommendation that going forward there is an innovation component and in parallel there should be a transfer to an operational system that is hardened with support, documentation, and communication.
5th recommendation is focusing on cross disciplinary actions going forward
EarthCube must also produce an implementable action plan.
The report is addressed to NSF; however, NSF has requested that the Leadership Council respond with a follow up meeting in nine months to discuss progress.
Comments about whether Unidata can be the home for the products coming out of the different projects has come on numerous times; however, there are serious challenges in taking on additional responsibilities b/c of documentation, support, and outreach for new EC products.
Main update is that universities are starting to access and use this resource. A lot of interest in the Atmospheric community, AMS panel had over 150 attendees; however, there are questions about how it is going to be sustained. CONDUIT is well used but it is limited to fixed time intervals whereas the big data portals at AWS or AZURE could make all of this available. Should we create tools that will allow you to analyze and drill down into large raw outputs of NCEP models. NOAA publishes 10% of their data but 18TB is currently unavailable.
ACTION 1: Strategic Plan next steps:
ACTION 2: Comparison between the 2011 Survey and 2016 Survey (JY)
ACTION 3: List essential functions from RAMADDA that should be transferred (UPC)
ACTION 4: Distribute Unidata’s github docker resources to the SAC and UC (UPC)