Meet the CDAWeb/SSCWeb Software Development Group

The CDAWeb/SSCWeb software group is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the CDAWeb and SSCWeb software systems and managing the data files that underlie these systems. The software development staff currently consists of Tami Kovalick, Rita Johnson and Howard Leckner.

Tami Kovalick is the task leader for this effort and has been working on various projects at the NSSDC for 16 years, dating back to her work on the NASA Climate Data System. She is a chief programmer analyst and has a background in computer science. Tami has led the combined CDAWeb and SSCWeb software efforts for the past seven years. She is supported by two very capable, “jack of all trades” programmers.

Rita Johnson is a senior programmer analyst with a background in physics and space science. Her duties include maintenance of CDAWeb and SSCWeb software (often in IDL, Perl, C, or Fortran), maintenance of CDAWeb and SSCWeb Web pages, daily CDAWeb meta-database updates, some occasional interaction with users, PIs (principal investigators) or CoIs (co-investigators), and sporadically some data ingest for SSCWeb. Rita joined NSSDC only a year ago, after working for the Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) at Goddard.

Howard Leckner is a senior programmer analyst who has been working at the NSSDC for many years. Most recently Howard joined the acquisition science task as the software support person. In this role he has been very instrumental in developing both generic and custom software to convert various data sets into CDF formatted files which in turn are made available on CDAWeb. Among Howard’s early accomplishments were contributing to NSSDC’s support for the 1985 encounter of ISEE 3/ICE with Comet Giacobini-Zinner and the development of the first parameter-selection interface connected with OMNI, NSSDC’s first network-accessible data set.