20020906: status of Unidata-Wisconsin 1 km Floaters

>From: "Eric J. Horst" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Millersville University
>Keywords: 200209061304.g86D4cj07386 Unidata-Wisconsin floaters

Eric and Rich,

>Millersville is now receiving the 1km GOES-8 imagery, which comes in
>approximately every 15 minutes. With this fabulous data now avialable to
>us, it's dawned on me that the "educational floaters" are largely
>redundant. The large format 1km imagery can be zoomed in and
>produce the same quality image as in the hourly Ed. floater.

This is correct for the sites that have the network bandwidth to receive
the data.  I am sure you can remember back to the time when you were
in this group.

>Do you have a sense if most other schools are receiving the same large
>format 1km imagery? If so, what is the future of the "educational floaters"?

Most other schools are not receiving the high resolution imagery.  If
they were, the current floaters would be redundant.

We are setting up a machine at SSEC that has all of the GOES-East and
GOES-West imagery -- including sounder channels -- on it.  Using McIDAS
ADDE, sites will be able to create their own floaters on the fly.  At this
point, the educational floaters in the Unidata-Wisconsin channel will
be scheduled for deletion.

I pointed out to Dave F. that you could have been making your own
floaters from the images you are now getting by the IDD using McIDAS
ADDE right along.  Several sites are already doing this from one of the
several THREDDS servers that have the data available: papagayo.unl.edu,
atm.geo.nsf.gov, cacimbo.ggy.uga.edu, pscwx.plymouth.edu,
stratus.al.noaa.gov, and adde.ucar.edu.  Of all of these servers, the
ones that are being fed the imagery using the IDD are papagayo,
stratus, and atm.  All others have NOAAPORT satellite ingest systems
(and atm will be getting its own in the coming months).

>Here at Millersville, I feel the educational floater imagery is
>now mainly just taking up bandwidth and disk space. Your thoughts?

Again, if everyone had the bandwidth to receive the high resolution
products, then the floaters would be redundant.  This is not, however,
the case (I wish it was!).

>Rich Clark thought this might be worth discussing at your meeting in
>October.

It is always good to discuss these issues at User Committee meetings.
I want to jog Rich's memory (we old farts need this kind of jogging
every so often :-) by reminding him that this has been discussed on
several occasions.  Our (UPC's) approach has been to setup servers that
have data (like imagery) that many sites just don't have the resources
to ingest/store/deal with.  Remote access through ADDE and DODS then
gives those users the ability to see anything they want when they
want.  These server technologies also give the users the ability to
transfer the imagery that is accessible remotely to local holdings so
they can put together their own sets of data for things like case
studies.

As a final thought, I am planning on adding a couple of new sectors to
the Unidata-Wisconsin datastream.  One would be over Brazil, and the
other over Argentina.  If the current floaters are determined by the
community to be unneeded, I will want to convert the floaters to create
sectors over Central America and the Caribbean.  Comments?

>Best Regards,

Cheers.

Tom