CONDUIT and Level II Data Distribution: Leveraging that Works for Collaborative Projects

Serving a diverse community of users, the Unidata Program Center (UPC) seeks collaborative opportunities to provide data, tools and software for education and research in earth system science. Two projects that began as grassroots efforts with the U. S. Weather Research Program, including several collaborating institutions are highlighted in this paper. At the core of both projects is Unidata's Local Data Manager (LDM) technology which delivers over 20.5 TB of data per week over Internet2, via the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system. Examples of how CONDUIT and Level II data are being used, along with the volumes of data distributed and the overall structure that makes it work using the LDM-IDD will be discussed.

Meeting the challenges presented by CONDUIT (Cooperative Opportunity for NCEP Data Using IDD Technology), the LDM-IDD is distributing high-resolution model data sets not currently available through NOAAPORT. Through the cooperation of NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) and National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and several institutions willing to be test sites initially, the data are now flowing to 71 sites at 46 unique domains.

The WSR-88D Level II data distribution began as the Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT) with several collaborators (University of Oklahoma, NSSL, University of Washington, et al) interested in accessing and using Level II data from the radars. Through stakeholder cooperation, a combination of leveraging technology and creative partners forming useful collaborations, the technology was transferred to the National Weather Service in 2004, and the data are now available to the broad community of users.