The importance of Unidata support to Plymouth State College

The Importance of Unidata Support to Plymouth State College

Plymouth State College has been involved with the Unidata program since its inception in the mid-1980s. The technologies provided by Unidata have evolved greatly over the ensuing period and so too have the myriad of educational and research uses at Plymouth State. Initially, PC-McIDAS software and data distribution provided the backbone of support and the first sophisticated real-time weather visualization capabilities on two local computers. Unidata also subsidized the receipt of other real-time data sources including facsimile maps via NAFAX (and later DIFAX) and domestic data via DDPLUS. In the early 1990's, Unidata served as a focal point for the Unix-based Weather Processor (WXP) software package from Purdue University that provided even greater flexibility and served as a basis for our first networked on-campus weather distribution system. This effort evolved into PSC's first Internet web page, the PSC Weather Center, which came online in April 1994. McIDAS-X also became available during this time period. Through additional National Science Foundation and college support, PSC was able to proliferate access to these weather visualization packages to many other client-PCs for use by its meteorology students. IDD became the next Unidata package to provide positive impacts to the program by providing access to real-time high-resolution NIDS radar data and NLDN lightning data and eventually opening the doors for other high resolution data services that were not previously affordable. Most recently, PSC has also started to use the Unidata-supported GEMPAK package as its newest visualization tool.

During this history, the capabilities have gone from those that were accessible to only a few students at a time to limited classroom displays to computers clusters for an entire lab class to full multimedia classroom presentations. The underlying data and software for these extensive applications is for the most part a direct result of the Unidata program. These systems have also been used extensively by our students and faculty in significant undergraduate research projects. The Unidata packages still serve as the core for many of PSC's web offerings that receive about 100,000 "hits" on average per week Additionally, support by Unidata personnel has been essential for much of the progress that has been made at Plymouth State because of its own limited support resources.

This paper will review the history of the Unidata as it pertains to PSC, discuss the varied uses of the data and packages by PSC, and demonstrate some of the web capabilities that would not be possible without the Unidata program.