Current Meteorological Data Acquisition Issues

Data, Data, and more Data... The Unidata community now has access to more meteorological data then most sites can accommodate. Soon, the spigot will be opened further. This gushing of data currently involves tradeoffs among required resources, latency, and reliability. As the number of data sources, types of data, and quantity of data continue to increase, will the capacity of networks and availability of networking infrastructure be adequate for current and future needs in education and research in the atmospheric sciences? What are the likely effects of the replacement of old infrastructure such as vBNS with new networking infrastructure such as Abilene on resources, data latencies, and reliability?

Current options to obtain data via the Internet include Unidata's IDD, as well as DODS, CODIAC, ADDE, and other systems. How are these systems used to find/obtain the needed data in a timely fashion? We propose answers to these questions and discuss future road blocks that could prevent reliable data dissemination.