In order to promote scientific collaborations among the U.S. Education and research communities and counterparts in Latin America, the Unidata Program Center (Unidata) of the U.S. University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, in cooperation with the University of São Paulo, hosted a Latin America Data Workshop in late August, 2008. The three day workshop was held in the Institute for Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences facilities on the USP campus in São Paulo, Brazil immediately preceding the biennial meeting (CBMET) of the Brazilian Meteorological Society (SBMET).

The goals of the Data Workshop were to:

• Foster scientific partnerships for exchanging knowledge and expertise among U.S. and Latin American educators and researchers

• Promote greater Latin American participation in free-and-open sharing of Earth System data

• Inform workshop participants of the wide variety of data available in the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) and its Brazilian counterpart (IDD-Brasil) data sharing networks and through remote data access technologies available through Unidata

• Inform workshop participants of the suite of freely-available analysis and display applications through Unidata and its collaborators

The three day Data Workshop was composed of a combination of presentations, breakout/discussion groups, and hands-on laboratory sessions that focused on the:

• Use of scientific datasets of interest to the Latin American community

• Availability of a wide variety of data through the IDD and IDD-Brasil data sharing networks including: real-time GOES imagery especially South American coverage from GOES-10; NOAA/NCEP high resolution global GFS model data; COSMIC global radio occultation (limb sounding) data; Brazilian mesoscale observational data; and global surface, upper air, ship/buoy, etc. observational data

• Use of Unidata's THREDDS Data Server (TDS) and McIDAS' ADDE capability for remote serving-of and access-to data

• Strategies for sharing of locally-held datasets of general interest

This presentation will present highlights from the workshop, and provide some thoughts on future steps that could be taken to further promote international collaborations.