Data Democratization - Promoting Real-Time Data Sharing and Use throughout the Americas

The Unidata Program Center (Unidata) of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR) is actively involved in international collaborations whose goals are real-time sharing of hydro-meteorological data by institutions of higher education throughout the Americas; in the distribution of analysis and visualization tools for those data; and in the establishment of server sites that provide easy-to-use, programmatic remote-access to a wide variety of datasets.

Data sharing capabilities are being provided by Unidata's Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system, a community-based effort that has been the primary source of real-time meteorological data for approximately 150 US universities for over a decade. A collaboration among Unidata, Brazil's Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC), the Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) has resulted in the creation of a Brazilian peer of the North American IDD, the IDD-Brasil. Collaboration among Unidata, the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM) seeks to extend IDD data sharing throughout Central America and the Caribbean in an IDD-Caribe. Collaboration between Unidata and the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Regional Meteorological Training Center (RMTC) based in Barbados, has been launched to investigate the possibility of expansion of IDD data sharing throughout Caribbean RMTC member countries. Most recently, efforts aimed at creating a data sharing network for researchers on the Antarctic continent have resulted in the establishment of the Antarctic-IDD.

Data analysis and visualization capabilities are being provided by Unidata through a suite of freely-available applications: the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) GEneral Meteorology PAcKage (GEMPAK); the Unidata Integrated Data Viewer (IDV); and University of Wisconsin, Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) Man-computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS).

Remote data access capabilities are provided by Unidata's Thematic Realtime Environmental Data Services (THREDDS) servers (which incorporate Open-source Project for a Network Data Access (OPeNDAP) data services), and the Abstract Data Distribution Environment (ADDE) of McIDAS.

It is envisioned that the data sharing capabilities available in the IDD, IDD-Brasil, and IDD-Caribe, remote data access capabilities available in THREDDS and ADDE, and analysis capabilities available in GEMPAK, the IDV, and McIDAS will help foster new collaborations among prominent university educators and researchers, national meteorological agencies, and WMO Regional Meteorological Training Centers throughout North, Central, and South America.

The Unidata Program is sponsored by the US National Science Foundation.