On July 13th 2006 during the triannual Unidata Workshop, members of the Unidata community got their first experience with capabilities being developed under the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project. The key LEAD goal demonstrated during the workshop was that of “Democratization,” that is, providing capabilities to the larger meteorological community.

At the workshop, participants worked with software that demonstrated the specific concepts of:

1) Lowering the barrier to entry by making it easy for users to:

• Experiment using meteorological tools

• Create meteorological forecasts

• Perform mesoscale modeling and forecasting

• Access data (source and product)

• Make use of large scale cyberinfrastructure (TeraGrid)

2) Giving users the freedom from technological issues such as:

• Hassle-free access to supercomputing resources

• Hassle-free execution of forecast models and related tools

• Data format independence

This talk will overview the capabilities presented to the Unidata workshop participants as well as capabilities developed since the workshop. There will also be a lessons-learned section. This overview will be accomplished with a live demonstration of some of the capabilities. Attendees of the AMS annual meeting will also be invited to hands-on demonstrations of full LEAD capabilities at the Unidata booth on the showroom floor.

Acknowledgement: The LEAD project involves the work of nearly 100 individuals whose dedication has resulted in the capabilities that will be shown here. The authors would like to recognize all of them, but in particular we'd like to recognize: John Caron, Rich Clark, Ethan Davis, Charles Hart, Yuan Ho, Scott Jenson, Rob Kambic, Brian Kelly, Ning Liu, Jeff McWhirter, Don Murray, Beth Plale, Rahul Ramachandran, Yogesh Simmhan, Kevin Thomas, Nithya Vijayakumar, Yunheng Wang, Dan Weber, and Bob Wilhelmson.