McIDAS-V used at Latvia course - lessons learnt

Course participants working on data at Latvia course.

Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Centre (LEGMC) organised in partnership with EUMETSAT arranged a short course for meteorologists on the Practical use of EUMETSAT data, in Riga, Latvia. The attendees of this workshop were meteorologists from Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Russia and Latvia – altogether 28 participants. Zanita Avotniece, Vesa Nietosvaara (both EUMETSAT) and Anna Eronn (SMHI) were instructors on this course. 

We tried to make this course as much hands-on as possible, keeping in mind we only had two and half days to cover several topics. for this purpose we decided to introduce McIDAS-V (free, open source software for 3D geophysical data analysis and visualization) and let the participants play with the data during the exercise sessions. 

We were  aware that trying out technology in a classroom course with quite strict time constraints contains a risk. To mitigate the risk we did the following: 

1. We used a set of pre-installed PCs in the classroom, all having the same OS and same performance. We decided not to invite people to take their personal laptops, as we felt any problem with installation would seriously slow down the session. On a longer course this would not be a problem.

2. Zanita installed the software couple of days before the course and tested it with the actual training data to be sure it would work during the course.

3. Zanita downloaded all the necessary data and saved it onto PC to avoid the use of internet during the exercise. 

4. Zanita created a detailed guidance for each exercise. The guidance included screenshots for each phase. This guidance was printed out and the participants could perform the tasks by following the guidance. 

5. We tried to make sure everyone was able to reach each step in the exercise and find an answer. Only after this we moved on to the next step.

Even with these precautions we still had quite a lot of work in managing the exercises successfully and within the given time, but the outcome of the sessions was very good: people felt excited to actually work on the data analyzing and visualizing the products rather than just viewing the images.