Monday, 13 January 2020: 11:00 AM
104A (Boston Convention and Exhibition Center)
From Gabriel Fahrenheit’s mercury thermometer to David Atlas’ development of weather radar, from the arrival of large-format facsimile transmission to Verner Suomi’s notion of observing the atmosphere from satellite-borne sensors, from ENIAC-computed weather predictions by Jule Charney, John von Neumann, et al to the large simulation-ensembles underpinning a Nobel Prize for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meteorology has been no stranger to technology-rooted evolution and transformation.
This submission characterizes how the Unidata Program at UCAR—conceived by scientists who foresaw benefits in the networked use of small computers and who gained vigorous encouragement from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—has stimulated another technology-rooted transformation. Unlike earlier examples, Unidata technologies were augmented with a social fabric or “virtual community” positioned to guide the endeavor for decades. This approach helped NSF depart from its typical pattern of (smaller) individual grants, instead funding a competitively-chosen central group at UCAR to develop needed infrastructure and to nurture the nascent virtual community.
Initially, community guidance focused primarily modernizing university techniques for acquiring and visualizing weather data in near-real time, supplanting facsimile- and teletype-based data transmission. However, Unidata’s impact extends far beyond that initial emphasis, due in major part to the richness of the embedded social fabric. From the outset—encouraged by NSF—the Unidata community was inclusive, embracing learners as well as seasoned professors, welcoming involvement by industry and government agencies (especially NOAA and NASA), and capitalizing on graduate students’ and early-career professionals’ inclinations to be “early adopters.” As a result, 35 years after inception, Unidata infrastructure and tools have prominent places in the offices, laboratories, field experiments, simulations, model-comparisons, data repositories, classrooms, and teaching methods of geoscientists and educators worldwide.
This retrospective on the Unidata story includes linkages, parallels and contrasts with the other technology-rooted transformations listed above.
This submission characterizes how the Unidata Program at UCAR—conceived by scientists who foresaw benefits in the networked use of small computers and who gained vigorous encouragement from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—has stimulated another technology-rooted transformation. Unlike earlier examples, Unidata technologies were augmented with a social fabric or “virtual community” positioned to guide the endeavor for decades. This approach helped NSF depart from its typical pattern of (smaller) individual grants, instead funding a competitively-chosen central group at UCAR to develop needed infrastructure and to nurture the nascent virtual community.
Initially, community guidance focused primarily modernizing university techniques for acquiring and visualizing weather data in near-real time, supplanting facsimile- and teletype-based data transmission. However, Unidata’s impact extends far beyond that initial emphasis, due in major part to the richness of the embedded social fabric. From the outset—encouraged by NSF—the Unidata community was inclusive, embracing learners as well as seasoned professors, welcoming involvement by industry and government agencies (especially NOAA and NASA), and capitalizing on graduate students’ and early-career professionals’ inclinations to be “early adopters.” As a result, 35 years after inception, Unidata infrastructure and tools have prominent places in the offices, laboratories, field experiments, simulations, model-comparisons, data repositories, classrooms, and teaching methods of geoscientists and educators worldwide.
This retrospective on the Unidata story includes linkages, parallels and contrasts with the other technology-rooted transformations listed above.
- Indicates paper has been withdrawn from meeting
- Indicates an Award Winner