A $4,500 grant was awarded to NIU staff meteorologist Gilbert Sebenste to improve his computer systems.

“One of the things we wanted to do is upgrade the aging computer services,” Sebenste said. “Money within the university was unavailable, so we had to look in other places for it.”

That other place was UNIDATA, which is a branch of the University Center for Atmospheric Research that is funded by the National Science Foundation.

“All of the universities who worked with UNIDATA submitted proposals,” Sebenste said. “UNIDATA got $100,000 total to give away. We ended up with $4,500 of it.”

The money has been spent to replace two computers that slowly digest current data, Sebenste said.

“We used to be able to handle one megabit per second. Next summer we should be at around 20 megabits per second,” he said. “That’s half of the campus Internet connection per second.”

One other thing Sebenste said he hopes to accomplish is to improve the speed of severe weather e-mail bulletins to users on campus.

“It used to take about seven minutes,” he said. “By Nov. 15, we will be able to get them out within seconds.”

NIU’s weather Web site also will be upgraded with more real-time lighting and radar pages. It can be found at http://weather.admin.niu.edu.