Unidata and Penn State Bring Weather Data to Students

The Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) package provides a stable mechanism for the dissemination of meteorological data from various sources to the greater Unidata community over the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) network.

The Unidata THREDDS and RAMADDA platforms provide simple methods to access these data. The Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has participated as an IDD level-two relay data distribution site since 1998, as a top-level relay of CONDUIT data since 2010, and as a THREDDS/RAMADDA data provider since 2011.

Prior to 2011, our IDD relay service was provided by servers purchased in 2005, each with an Intel Xeon 3.0MHz processor and 8 GB of RAM. In addition to maintenance issues related to the machines' age, the existing servers were only marginally capable of meeting our current needs. Using funds provided by the 2011 Unidata Community Equipment Award program, a trio of quad-processor Xeon E5606 2.13 GHz 64-bit machines running the LDM and Linux Virtual Server (LVS) in a virtual machine configuration is now providing IDD relay service at Penn State. In addition, the storage capacity of our THREDDS/RAMADDA data service was expanded to make more historical Bufkit data available to the Unidata community.

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