Re: NOAAPORT receive system feeding LDM

Mike,

I want to reinforce Ben's point that we should add additional NOAAport
redundancy into the IDD only with caution.  The degree of redundancy
already in place is sufficient to yield pretty high levels of
reliability, and additional redundancy potentially could REDUCE
reliability by creating congestion.  This outcome is especially likely
unless we are certain that all ingesters package the data so as to
produce the same MD5 checksums, etc.  To further complicate matters,
we envision a transition--perhaps next year--to packaging the data
with identifiers that are more directly linked to the headers used in
NOAAport.  (These contain more information than can be conveyed in WMO
headers.)  We believe the transition will help Unidata users utilize
important additional NOAAport products, including current ones, such
as satellite images, and future ones, such as NIDS.

Therefore I suggest that--for now--Unidata users view additional
NOAAport downlinks as valuable primarily for GINI data and as a means
to reduce network loading at the local site.  Regarding the latter, a
university potentially may reduce the load on its Internet link by
using a NOAAport downlink as a primary data source (backed up by an
IDD feed).  After the aforementioned transition to NOAAport-style
headers is 100% complete, we can begin to examine the potential
benefits of incorporating additional downlinks into the IDD, perhaps
with regional specialization or other new wrinkles.

Best regards,
Dave