COMET^® Scope and Policy Statement

Describes the COMET scope and policy statement.

Purpose of this Document:

This document describes the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) and the collection it provides to the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE).

The COMET Program Defined:

The COMET Program develops and delivers education and training for operational meteorologists, using both traditional classroom and distance learning delivery methods. Classroom-based activities include courses, workshops, and symposiums offered in a state-of-the art facility where lectures are combined with hands-on exercises. Distance learning education and training emphasizes interactive, media-rich modular course materials provided via the Web, CD-ROM, and teletraining. The COMET Program has also developed a case study library in collaboration with other UCAR Programs to provide data sets for research and education programs. Through its Outreach Program, the COMET Program supports research partnerships between the academic community and operational weather forecasters. The COMET Program is currently funded through a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which administers and funnels financial support from the National Weather Service, the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NMOC), the National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS), Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC)and National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite Systems (NPOESS)

The COMET Collection Defined:

The scope of the COMET collection is atmospheric science with the goal of making the resources used in its training programs (described above) accessible. The resources accessible in the collection favor content that is most useful to operational or graduate-level meteorologists. The collection seeks to make available learning materials on climate, icing, convective weather, fog and low stratus, hydrology, satellite meteorology, numerical weather prediction, winter weather, hurricanes and other mesoscale meteorology topics.

The collection is aligned with the DLESE Collections Scope and Policy Statement (http://www.dlese.org/documents/policy/CollectionsScope_final.html) as well as the DLESE Collections Accession Policy (http://www.dlese.org/documents/policy/collections_accession.html). This means, the COMET collection is using DLESE's current metadata format and provides all required metadata.

The modules within the COMET collection are a rich source of individual media objects which are available for reuse for educational, non-commercial purposes. These media objects can be accessed via the COMET Multimedia database at the following address: http://archive.comet.ucar.edu/moria/index.jsp

Collection Contacts:

Please direct questions about the collection to Mike Smith or Mark Mulholland at support@comet.ucar.edu.

Terms of Use:

There are two terms of use issues for the COMET collection, one is for the resources in the collection and one is for the metadata records of the collection.

The resources within the COMET Collection are composed of complete entities (modules, Webcasts, case studies, learning objects, etc). All resources within the COMET Collection may be used without any fee or cost, to access, link to and use, create derivative works, publish, distribute, disseminate, transfer, or in any manner alter, modify, revise, crop, copy (an unlimited number of times), edit, digitize, and authorize such uses for third parties for any non-profit training, research, or educational purpose whatsoever and not for any direct or indirect commercial purpose or advantage. Any copyright notice or other credit attached to or imbedded in any of the resources must remain intact and unaltered and shall be affixed to any use or copy of the resource.

The following statement must be used when crediting UCAR and the COMET Program as the source of the resource(s).

"The source of this material is the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education, and Training (COMET®) Web site at http://meted.ucar.edu/ of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) pursuant to a Cooperative Agreement with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ©1997-2003 University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. All Rights Reserved."

All metadata records within the collection are copyright (c) 1997-2003 UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) but metadata may be used as long as it is consistent with DLESE Intellectual Property Policy (http://www.dlese.org/documents/policy/DLESE_IP_approved.html). This allows for the redistribution of metadata records. The individual metadata records are available for harvest from COMET or DLESE.

Quality Assurance of the Collection:

Quality assurances also has two issues, one for the resources in the collection and one for the metadata records of the collection The resources made accessible via the collection are of a very high quality because they are used to train operational meteorologists and have undergone extensive development and testing in order to be part of COMET training materials. The metadata records are generated by COMET staff and reviewed for meeting minimum DLESE metadata requirements, spelling and data integrity. If users of the collection find errors or have suggestions for improvement for either the resources in the collection or for the metadata of the collection, COMET will consider the suggestions and make changes as appropriate.

Persistence Plan for the Collection:

The collection is expected to continue growing and to exist indefinitely. If for some reason the collection cannot be maintained by COMET, COMET will make arrangements with DLESE in order for DLESE to continue to make the collection accessible.