The international expansion of the IDD is, in part, an outgrowth of the MeteoForum pilot project of the Unidata and COMET programs of UCAR. MeteoForum is designed to assist WMO Regional Meteorological Training Centers (RMTCs) to improve service in the areas of hydro-meteorology, agriculture, and disaster management. By accessing comprehensive collections of training materials and real-time and historical data, the RMTCs will be able to enrich the education they offer to hydro-meteorological professionals in their region.
A collaboration with Brazil's Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC, a division of INPE), the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) has resulted in the expansion of the IDD into Brazil through the creation of the IDD-Brazil, a data sharing network that will first provide access to real-time hydro-meteorological data to Brazilian universities and eventually to universities throughout South America.
A similar collaboration with the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) has extended the IDD into Central America. At the time this paper was being developed, a new collaboration with the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH) was being launched to investigate the expansion of the IDD throughout the Caribbean. The combination of these two efforts are aimed at the creation of an IDD-Caribe.
The IDD-Brazil and incipient IDD-Caribe are now delivering the full set of global observations and NCEP and UK MET global model output available in NOAAPORT, and all GOES-East imager channels to top level redistribution nodes established at prominent national universities and research institutes in near real-time.
It is envisioned that these data sharing efforts will foster new collaborations among national meteorological agencies, WMO RMTCs and prominent universities throughout South, Central, and North America.
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