News and Notes

Those of you that follow along with the IEM Github Repository or see the code commits mentioned within the Daily Bulletin Email may be wondering about some recent changes denoting stopping various archival activities. This change probably warrants a news item detailing it, so here we are!

The IEM attempts to archive various meteorological datasets useful for funded research projects that keep the IEM going. These archives include relational databases, flat files on spinning disks / servers at ISU, and files stored within various cloud services Iowa State University has contracts with. Over the years, the IEM took advantage of "unlimited" storage options available at Google and Box to make various archives available within ISU and the public. Sadly, there are no unlimited options left, so a number of archives curated there need to spin down prior to newly enforced quotas set to start off 2026.

The good news is that the vast majority of data you access via the IEM is not impacted by this change, but there are two niche datasets that do have users that will be impacted. The most significant one is the archival of raw MRMS grib data. The other dataset being the archival of satellite imagery generated by the College of DuPage. The mitigation for these two archives is that the MRMS data is now mostly redundantly stored within the AWS Opendata Project and the raw GOES satellite data is stored at AWS as well, so there is a path to regenerate archive plots via that data source.

The IEM just found out about this quota change on Monday (22 September) and have just begun engaging collaborators on what could be done with some of this archived data. Some of the datasets are small enough to come back to live at ISU within current IEM hardware on campus.

To summarize, hopefully impacts to IEM users and projects will be minimal, but some archives will need to be removed or scaled back in scope. As always, please reach out to daryl with any questions you have!