Cooperation among Brazil's Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC, a division of INPE), the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and the US Unidata Program Center has resulted in the expansion of the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system in Brazil. This two year old effort, named the IDD-Brazil, is now delivering the full set of global observations, global model output transmitted distributed the US NWS in NOAAPORT, and all GOES imager channels in near real-time to top level redistribution nodes established at CPTEC and the UFRJ. From there, the data is being relayed to a rapidly increasing community of university users.

Comparisons of IDD-Brazil-conveyed data received at CPTEC and the same types received from the WMO Regional Center in Brasilia have demonstrated that the IDD-Brazil reliably delivers a higher volume of data (all of which originates in the GTS) with comparably low latencies. Because of the favorable intercomparisons, data received through the IDD-Brazil are now being incorporated into the data assimilation processes used to initialize the COLA global and South American ETA models run by CPTEC.

The data sharing component of the IDD-Brazil will be used to disseminate the output of the CPTEC models, satellite imagery, satellite derived products, and hard-to-obtain mesonet and automated reporting network observations to university participants in both the South American IDD-Brazil and North American IDD. Dissemination of the observational data is important given the sparse coverage of WMO synoptic reporting stations in Brazil. In addition, numerical output from regional modeling efforts at the UFRJ and USP will be available for sharing among interested IDD-Brazil and IDD participants.

It is envisioned that data sharing efforts such as these will foster new collaborations among Brazilian meteorological centers and universities and their counterparts throughout South, North, and Central America.