Status Report: Support
October 2020 - April 2021
Jennifer Oxelson, Tom Yoksas, UPC Staff
Areas for Committee Feedback
We are requesting your feedback on the following topics:
- Is the support that we provide sufficient for the community’s needs?
If not, what else should we be doing?
Activities Since the Last Status Report
Training
- Since 2018, the UPC has been focusing its in-person training efforts on regional workshops and short courses.
- Additional resources will be directed towards developing online training materials.
- Unidata recently hired a specialist in online training to help with modernization of our training materials
New Activities
In order to fulfill our objectives articulated in the Unidata 2018 Proposal, focused efforts are needed in two major areas:
- Enhance electronic support offerings
- Create instructional materials for online virtual training
Relevant Metrics
Since January 26, 2006 over 64200 user support "transactions" (new inquiries and follow-ups) have been processed through the Unidata inquiry tracking system. Other methods of providing answers to questions posed (e.g., Github, Stack Overflow, Jira, mailing list replies, etc.) add substantially to the support load.
Additional metrics may be found in the Comprehensive Metrics Data portion of this meeting’s agenda.
Fig. 1: Below are histograms that portray the number of Unidata email responses for categories of support logged in the Unidata Inquiry Tracking System for the 12 month period from August 1, 2019 until July 31, 2020.
The quarters shown are defined as:
Winter: January, February, March | Spring: April, May, June | Summer: July, August, September | Fall: October, November, December |
Individual support activities included in the categories shown above are listed in the following table.
Category | eSupport Departments |
AWIPS | Support AWIPS |
Data | Support CaseStudy, Support CONDUIT, Support Datastream, Support LEAD, Support Level II, Support NOAAPORT, Support SUOMINET |
GEMPAK | Support GEMPAK |
IDD | Support IDD, Support IDD Antarctica, Support IDD Brasil, Support IDD Cluster, Support IDD SCOOP, Support IDD TIGGE |
IDV | Support IDV, Support IDV Storm, Support McV, Support VisAD |
LDM | Support LDM |
McIDAS | Support McDevelop, Support McIDAS |
Miscellaneous | Administration, Development, Plaza, Staging Folder, Support, Support eSupport, Support Miscellaneous, Support Platforms, Support Plaza, Student Interns, Systems |
NetCDF | Support LibCF, Support netCDF |
Outreach | Outreach, Polcomm, Science Gateway, Support Egrants, Support News, Support Outreach, Support Workshop, Usercomm, Student Interns |
Python | Support Python |
RAMADDA | Support RAMADDA |
THREDDS | Support netCDF Java, Support THREDDS |
Utilities | Support LDM-McIDAS, Support netCDF Decoders, Support netCDF Perl, Support OPeNDAP, Support Rosetta, Support UDUNITS |
Comments
- The total support provided by the UPC continues to be substantial: yearly totals have shown a slight decline over the past several years, but this is most likely attributable by the increased ways support is being provided. Overall support activities vary by somewhat by quarter. Spikes in support for individual packages is largely correlated with the releases of new distributions of the packages.
- Support for netCDF continues to be substantial, and is understandable given the very large number of users of the package worldwide.
- Support for the legacy visualization packages GEMPAK and McIDAS has decreased over the past several years, most likely due to GEMPAK users investigations of use of AWIPS and Python/MetPy.
- Support for AWIPS has steadily increased and has exceeded that for GEMPAK over the past couple of years.
- Support for Python scripting using MetPy is growing markedly.
- Support for LDM, IDD, and Data continue at a high levels and show some variability throughout the year.
Notes
These numbers and conclusions should not be taken too literally, for several reasons:
- For some packages, multiple responses in the same thread may be bundled into a single archived email. Other packages have each response in a thread counted separately.
- After a new release of software, there may be a flurry of the same or similar questions, which can be answered in separate emails or in a single mailing list posting.
- The graph primarily represents support of end users and site administrators, not developers. Support for non-Unidata developers in projects such as THREDDS, IDV, GEMPAK, and McIDAS requires significant resources, but is difficult to assess.
- Not all support records were indexable for this report. Given this, the above numbers are an **underestimate** of the actual support being provided by the UPC.
Additional User Support Metrics
Strategic Focus Areas
We support the following goals described in Unidata Strategic Plan:
- Managing Geoscience Data
Unidata User Support enables access to geoscience data by supporting the use of tools created and/or supported by the UPC. - Providing Useful Tools
A significant part of providing useful tools is providing support for those tools. Unidata has always provided world class support for all of the tools that it makes freely available to the greater geoscience community.
- Supporting People
The user support provided by the UUPC is recognized throughout the atmospheric science community. Unidata’s outreach efforts are routinely noted as being exceptional in surveys of the NCAR/UCAR community.
Prepared April, 2021