October 1: Users Committee
October 2: Joint Committee
October 3: Strategic Advisory Committee
Committee Members: Kevin Goebbert (Chair), John Allen, Eric Brunning, Tomer Burg, Alex Davies (Remote), Daryl Herzmann, Lena Heuscher, Shawn Riley, Kim Wood, Nicole Moelders (visiting from SAC)
Federal representatives: Carissa Klemmer
UPC Staff: Mohan Ramamurthy, Sean Arms, Zach Bruick, Shay Carter, Julien Chastang, Ethan Davis, Doug Dirks, Steve Emmerson, Ward Fisher, Yuan Ho, Terry Mitchell-Sur, Inken Purvis, Sheri Ruschetta, Josh Young
The morning session consisted of an orientation for new committee members. Mohan Ramamurthy, Kevin Goebbert, and Josh Young provided a brief introduction to the scope and purpose of the committees. (Presentation)
The Users Committee portion of the day began in the afternoon.
The committee discussed challenges with the current awards. These include that this is only used for equipment and not staff time; additionally, universities lack system administrators to either do this or the capacity to learn it. It is unclear to institutions what frequency they can resubmit for funding.
Unidata staff noted that salary or travel are not within scope; cloud services are possible but not necessarily the best use of these funds. We typically do not purchase data switches, etc.
Committee members suggested sending the call to previous applicants or recipients. Also consider contacting Department Chairs about this funding opportunity. Another suggestion included providing examples of what has been funded in the past instead of focus areas. Also consider adding text to cover an FAQ
ACTION: Review Equipment Award announcement language and communication strategy (Committee)
ACTION: Consider topics for special consideration (online) (Committee)
Daryl has been supporting this project for the last few years and with his transition off of the committee would like to see the project adopted by Unidata. Some changes would need to take place for this to occur. However, Jenn agreed to work with Daryl on this matter.
GUIDANCE: Jenn work with Daryl to prepare RTStats for production use
Casey Davenport, John Allen, and Shawn Riley presented the proposed next steps with each one offering to host a regional event focused on adding data and computational thinking in courses based on guidance from educational researchers and available Unidata services (i.e. Jupyter hub). Kim Wood noted that she is happy to be involved.
John Allen presented an updated draft of the DeSouza Award description and asked for comments from the committee. Members agreed to provide feedback within two weeks.
ACTION: Provide any comments or revisions to the DeSouza Award text within the next 2 weeks
Shawn Riley: Lots of working with our central IT because they are trying to control purchases. Lots of time helping students with python especially the launch of a new curriculum that requires them to use more python.
Lena Heuscher: UAH Atmospheric Science Department merged with the Earth System Science in one umbrella. This change has been coming for a while but still disruptive.
Eric Bruning: Texas Tech is a graduate-focused program with limited dedicated staff and infrastructure. LDM is used but so is Visual Basic. Thinking about different models; the west Texas mesonet doesn’t have state support so we are looking at doing a cost model to maintain. Found some data minded folks in the Biology department that I plan to talk to about how we grow scientific atmospheric capacity to get the job done at the university department.
John Allen: One IT staff member that can use linux on campus. Tried to engage higher ups about having a fixed term staff that can provide that service. I’m now working on getting JupyterHub in line with permissions. The java course has been removed and replaced with a python focused one using Unidata tools and some stuff developed in-house. I would like to try the cloud jupyter hub for the modeling course next semester but will see.
Alex Davies: Positive things include changing our name from Oceano to Atmospheric and Oceanography and will go online next Fall. In the Met track we will move from Matlab to python. We are building out our mini-mesonet/estuary obs. We also finally be building a robust and accessible CDT data archive. On the negative side, Congress decided that we have to have a cyber secure building with a skiff; all of this resulted in loss of basic services such as FTP.
Casey Davenport: Our building is going under entire renovation which includes an opportunity to renovate all classrooms, labs, server space. This will be several years of work but we are in the dreaming stages. I would like to include a bit more python in my programming course that I’m teaching this spring.
Kevin Goebbert: Partnered with Ryan May on a Metpy grant so I spent much of the summer comparing MetPy to Gempak; made it through most of the scalar calculations. The conversion of wind speed was the most interesting because there was a difference between nautical miles versus land miles. Freshmen class moved from gempak to Metpy. Accessing point data is still a big limitation. One faculty member is looking to bring some real python analysis in an early class. I also recently became Commissioner of Education and Human Resources.
Kim Wood: Mississippi State will host NOAA’s new Orion supercomputer. We recently renovated our classroom which has made such a difference. Our computational methods course was also python but was based on Python 2, the course will be handed off to another instructor with a computer science background. Also developing a new Interpreting NWP course. Our university is instituting ADA compliance in the next couple of weeks and I learned that I will lose my server if I don’t become ADA compliant. Have some thoughts on making point data.
Nicole Moelders: Governor has changed from one cut to three cuts over three years. Oil price went down so that made the state revenue become low but since the state had been previously been high we had many employees. They have cut data storage and plan to charge anyone with above 10 Tb of data and so atmospheric science, chemistry, and Earth system science are impacted. If you download WRF for arctic reanalysis you can put 1 tb in spinning disc and 10 tb in archive but it is 24 tb of data. We are having to change our workflow to subset; however, you have to understand where and how to cut just the essential bits.
Daryl Herzmann: New hire coming on with boundary layer meteorology expertise with a couple additional hires next fall. One student is still using fortran though everyone else is in python. Archives are in good shape. Amazon asked us about pushing MRMS to S3.
Tomer Burg: Last couple of months have been intense; I finished my MS then went to NCEP, and moved to Oklahoma last month. Trying to get a new website up at OU.
ACTION: Send out a note to the Users Community for any folks that are extensive AWIPS users (Kevin G.)
Spring meeting; if you have any specific requests for the next meeting agenda please inform Kevin Goebbert or Josh Young. If you want a deeper dive on a particular technology that would be appropriate. If you want to present something that you are working on please do so.
Tomer Burg: My goal is to have a repository of algorithms to just plug in data sets.
Nicole Moelders: I would love for expermentialist to not shut down the system. You have to identify the format they use and create a data file that fills the gap.
Eric Bruning: BlueSky notion about transition from research to almost operations I’ve wondered if it would be possible to have the community use IDD more frequently. As part of a real time product.
John Allen: AGU’s recent transition to require data to not be stored with the user has caused a quandary because who can afford to store these big data sets?
Committee Members: Sepi Yalda (co-Chair), Kevin Goebbert (co-Chair), John Allen, Marty Baxter, Eric Brunning, Tomer Burg, Alex Davies (Remote), Victor Gensini, Chris Hennon, Daryl Herzmann, Lena Heuscher, Nicole Moelders, Gretchen Mullendore (Remote), Pete Pokrandt, Shawn Riley, Kim Wood
Federal representatives: David Blodgett, Bernard Grant, Scott Jacobs, Carissa Klemmer, Chris Lynnes (Remote)
UCAR Representatives: Jeff de La Beaujardiere, Doug Schuster
UPC Staff: Mohan Ramamurthy, Sean Arms, Zach Bruick, Shay Carter, Julien Chastang, Ethan Davis, Doug Dirks, Steve Emmerson, Ward Fisher, Yuan Ho, Terry Mitchell-Sur, Inken Purvis, Sheri Ruschetta, Josh Young
See Mohan’s presentation.
Discusson:
Sepi Yalda: Action to map staff to task to project
Victor Gensini: Do we have metrics to identify use among the community.
Kevin Tyle: Maybe that is a topic for the spring meeting
Victor Gensini: I would strongly recommend doubling the equipment award size or even going to $50k
Sepi Yalda: Could we do a regional workshop as part of the award? Where Unidata also goes to the site and provides a regional workshop.
Mohan Ramamurthy: It has happened at times though not as an explicit requirement
Funds are available from the 2018 Unidata Users Workshop. UPC proposes to use these funds to conduct several regional workshops focusing on topics that grew out of the 2018 workshop.
Josh’s presentation.
Josh’s presentation.
ACTION: Email committee members Tuesday, October 8th about MSI document review
Discussion:
Mohan Ramamurthy: How do you plan on managing all of the user accounts?
Chris Lynnes: We see the user relying upon their own cloud account. Very generic products/analysis will be done on the users account.
Carissa’s presentation.
ACTION: Full list of available products on Conduit by spring and any help with reliability (Carissa Klemmer)
Pete Pokrandt: We use Conduit a lot but I’m not sure there is value in using .25 GFS out to 16 days forecast. Suggestion to reach out to Victor, Pete for virtual participation in this session.
Carissa: Conduit is only on College Park machine and not in Boulder (similar to Centers); if we fail over from Boulder to College Park we were hitting limits. We figured out one was a Citrix load balancer. Firewalls are hitting limits and will be upgraded next week.
Mohan’s presentation.
Julien’s presentation.
2019 Russell L. DeSouza Award honoree Pete Pokrandt gave a talk looking at changes in the dissemination of atmospheric science data over the years he has been involved with the Unidata program.
Committee Members: Sepi Yalda (Chair), Kevin Goebbert (Users committee), Marty Baxter, Victor Gensini, Chris Hennon, Nicole Moelders, Gretchen Mullendore (Remote)
Federal representatives: David Blodgett, Bernard Grant, Scott Jacobs
UCAR Representatives: Jeff de La Beaujardiere, Doug Schuster
UPC Staff: Mohan Ramamurthy, Ethan Davis, Doug Dirks, Terry Mitchell-Sur, Josh Young
Victor Gensini: Faculty at Northern Illinois University and my areas of specialty include physical geography and visualization
Chris Hennon: Used to be tropical Met now just teach and run the program
Kevin Goebbert: Computer Apps, Synoptic,
Chuck Pavloski: Joint appointment between Department and Cyberscience Institute
Marty B: Professor CMU, synoptic, undergrad director,
Sepi Yalda: Professor of Meteorology also oversee all of the Emergency Management programs, a lot of teaching, administering, also do research in climate dynamics
Kevin Tyle: Former Users Committee chair, worked at NCEP, IT manager for department at University of Albany, also teach computing.
Nicole Moelders: Professor at UAF, teach Atmospheric Science Introduction at the 600 level so you put all undergraduate stuff in one class, hydromet, mesoscale dynamics; research interests are natural and anthropogenic impacts on air quality
Dave Blodgett: USGS Water Mission Area, Integrated Modeling and Prediction Division; Civil Engineer with a data habitat; worked on downscaled climate data; currently working on operationalizing a daily prediction of water budget model; serve on standards bodies;
Gretchen Mullendor: Professor at UND with convective modeling my major research interest
Bernard’s presentation.
Josh’s presentation.
Consider having the private sector sponsor (training and workforce development) within Unidata and UCAR. Examples cited were technology companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) sponsor interns that learn skills valuable to them. No direct pathway to employment but increase the pool of skilled applicants.
Kevin Tyle: Real concern about having 5 viz packages and suggest that we go all into python and AWIPS
Mohan Ramamurthy: Gempak has become community supported and IDV has continued community use
Dave Blodgett: If the community cares about this thing the community needs to support the package (by contributing) which raises questions about the ease of contributing and what is the governance
Kevin Tyle: For the foreseeable future with limited resources, what do you want from the UC and SAC?
Mohan Ramamurthy: Toughest choice is when we do sunset things.
Dave Blodgett: Having the argument in open is the only way to resolve the fear and churn.
Kevin Goebbert: Communicating to the community what are the options to replace a package that are on glide.
Jeff De La Beuajardiere: Potential valuable collaboration between MetPy and GeoCAT
Dave Blodgett: Could Unidata coordinate a hackathon around geoscience open data?
Jeff De La Beuajardiere: What are the collaborations between IDV and VAPOR?
ACTION: UPC product on the risk, status, and opportunities for each product
ACTION: Share product with committee chairs and decide how to proceed