Greetings all,
I am writing this email to convey my support for NSF Unidata to continue to
investigate the WIS 2.0 paradigm and how it can be leveraged for our
community.
It is likely no surprise to many here that I've been keeping a keen eye out
for how our corner of the industry has been progressing, and this WIS2
stuff... man... I'm sold, it is the future. A metadata push service could
be mighty powerful as our technology and relating ecosystems continue to
evolve.
I've noticed that both the future of the SBN as well as the potential for
WIS2 have been discussed in recent NSF Unidata Committee meetings, and I
was very pleased to see WIS2 being taken seriously by Unidata. Personally,
I think the sooner we can adopt into this paradigm the better off we could
be, but it's still in its infancy as not much data [US at least] seems to
be getting published to global brokers to date. That's okay though, there
is still time for us to learn before it goes into operations.
I've been playing around with WIS2 "in a box" myself recently, and was
pleasantly surprised to see how straight-forward the WMO has made the
install and the plethora of solid documentation that exists. In addition,
there is an included a web gui to make configuration and incorporating data
sets that much easier. Plus there are multiple avenues to pushing a data
set's metadata into a WIS2 message, and with a little effort I believe this
would fit _very_ well into our use cases within Academia.
Given the recent NSF Unidata Committee summaries I'm linking below, the
general direction the winds are blowing, and given my own experiences with
WIS2 thus far, I would like to petition Unidata to make investigating what
the WIS2 Paradigm can do for our community a priority. I think that if
Unidata could spin up a public WIS2 node, maybe work on a GTS to WIS2
conversion to supply data... and even back so WIS2 could feed the IDD (as
was suggested in the Fall 2025 committee staff report)... there would be a
lot of value of us there. I completely understand shifting priorities in
times and situations such as these is a delicate thing. I am merely
voicing my opinion that this is a direction we should be exploring with
vigor.
This has been two cents given by yours truly, hope y'all are doin well.
Best,
-Mike
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSyUyB3TKkfnLmlqGz9FK7TCM1mAWGAAzOJLxUXj5hQfn7ONwBqe6rRmnQ90WwqzcISMS3AXwZLZirI/pub
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9Y8oq7nMnE8Wei28xoS4uzldP14wWVpxZdE29eWC8nn-GCCO3s2GxZlKBMOPgXAaiN-RC7xAKdmZd/pub?pli=1
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/committees/joint_meetings/2025Fall/summary
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/committees/joint_meetings/2025Fall/statusreports
https://docs.wis2box.wis.wmo.int/en
--
- Mike Zuranski, Zuranski Weather LLC
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Disclaimer: Thoughts, opinions and all general nonsenses are those of
myself and in no way reflect the views or positions of any other person or
entity.
