The Unidata Program Center (UPC) at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research enables academic institutions to acquire real-time atmospheric data and employ sophisticated software to use them. UPC offers support services that encompass training, troubleshooting, documentation, and metadata, as well as workshops, electronic mailing lists, and Web pages that stimulate community-wide dialogues. UPC continues to develop software for improved ease-of-use and greater compatibility with more data access and advocating free and open data exchange. Such compatibility entails, beyond adapting decoders and applications to analyze and display the data, development of the Internet Data Distribution system to incoporate new sources; to handle higher data rates; to adjust itself automatically to variations in user demands; to adapt dynamically to Internet performance variations; and to exploit networking advances, such as multicast protocols.
