Dear Community,
Since the 1980s, the NSF Unidata program has partnered with the University
of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC
<https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/>) to provide access to and support for
SSEC’s Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS
<https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mcidas/>). For nearly 30 years, the Program has
maintained and supported a modified version of the McIDAS-X
<https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mcidas/software/x/> package tailored to the
needs of academic users. This post describes the current circumstances
surrounding our distribution of McIDAS-X and lays out our planned future
actions in support of university users of the software.
NSF Unidata’s Relationship with SSEC
The NSF Unidata Program has had a long and productive relationship with
SSEC; the two programs have supported each other in order to distribute
Earth Systems Science data and create software tools to store and analyze
those data. As a part of that ongoing relationship, NSF Unidata has served
as a conduit for McIDAS software to the university community.
McIDAS software is licensed to members of the McIDAS User’s Group (MUG
<https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mcidas/mug/>). The MUG has been in existence
since 1989 as a subscription-based membership group that pools its
subscription fees to pay for the maintenance and upgrades of McIDAS
software and documentation. In order to reduce costs and enhance access to
McIDAS in the university community, NSF Unidata and the SSEC created an
arrangement whereby NSF Unidata maintained a MUG membership, and was
allowed to redistribute the software. Specifically, NSF Unidata is allowed
to redistribute McIDAS-X to individuals who are from a US degree-granting
educational institution (and have a .EDU email address associated with
their institution) or to other users (including commercial entities) who
are themselves members of the MUG. The burden of technical support for
university users who received the software from NSF Unidata would fall on
the Program itself, rather than on the SSEC.
In addition to providing technical support for McIDAS-X, NSF Unidata
technical staff created an NSF Unidata McIDAS-X distribution package, which
combines SSEC's McIDAS-X and McIDAS-XCD packages and contains numerous
modifications that add functionality. (McIDAS-XCD is the decoding package
for data products delivered via NOAAPort.)
McIDAS Development at the Program Center
Since late 2023, the NSF Unidata Program Center has not had personnel on
staff with expertise in McIDAS-X development. In consultation with our
advisory committees, we made the decision to focus the remaining
development resources on other visualization packages, including the IDV,
AWIPS, and MetPy.
Because both the number of users requesting support and the rate of change
in the McIDAS-X package itself are low, this situation did not cause any
immediate hiccups. NSF Unidata McIDAS-X version 2023 — the most recent NSF
Unidata release — is still available to university users. However, we are
no longer in a position to either release updates (even bug fixes) or
provide technical support for the package.
What This Means for the Community
While the NSF Unidata Program Center can no longer create new releases of
our version of McIDAS-X, we intend to maintain the Program Center’s MUG
membership, allowing us to continue to:
- Provide access to version 2023 of NSF Unidata McIDAS-X to those who
meet the criteria outlined above.
- Provide access to data hosted on the Program Center’s ADDE servers.
(ADDE is part of the McIDAS-X package.)
In addition, while the Program Center will no longer offer direct technical
support, we will continue to host the mcidas-x mailing list
<https://mailinglists.unidata.ucar.edu/listinfo/mcidas-X#gsc.tab=0>,
providing a space where community members can gather to ask questions and
support each other.
For those looking to transition from using McIDAS-X to other tools
supported by the NSF Unidata Program, we suggest considering the following
options:
IDV (or McIDAS-V)
NSF Unidata’s Integrated Data Viewer (IDV
<https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv>) and SSEC’s McIDAS-V
<https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mcidas/software/v/> are freely available 3D
geoscience visualization and analysis tools based on the same core
technologies. While the two packages do differ in their exact capabilities,
they are broadly similar and capable of accessing and displaying data from
the same types of sources, including McIDAS ADDE servers.
AWIPS
NSF Unidata supports a version of the National Weather Service’s Advanced
Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS
<https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/awips>) tailored for use by the
university community. There is significant overlap between the
functionality of the AWIPS and McIDAS-X packages.
MetPy
NSF Unidata’s MetPy <https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/metpy> is a
collection of tools in Python for reading, visualizing, and performing
calculations with weather data. While MetPy does not have a graphical user
interface, it does support the same types of analysis and display
operations McIDAS-X is generally used for.
Other Free and Open Source Options
In addition, a number of other open source tools not supported by NSF
Unidata are available. The following list is not exhaustive, but these
packages may be worth investigating, depending on your needs and situation:
- QGIS <https://qgis.org/>
- Gdal <https://gdal.org>
- GEMPAK <https://unidata.github.io/gempak/>
- Grads <http://opengrads.org/>
- GMP <https://gmplib.org/>
- Grass <https://grass.osgeo.org/>
If you have questions about access to the current version of NSF Unidata
McIDAS-X, please contact support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. If you have questions
about using McIDAS-X, consider posting on the mcidas-x mailing list
<https://mailinglists.unidata.ucar.edu/listinfo/mcidas-X#gsc.tab=0>.