This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting in Austin, Texas hosted more than 3400 attendees — more than the 2012 meeting — despite the fact that many government employees were unable to attend due to uncertainties about the federal budget. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.

With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.

Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.

The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies.

Spend the summer in beautiful Boulder, Colorado

Do you use Unidata software packages? Do you love to write code? The Unidata Summer Internship program is looking for you!

The Unidata Summer Internship offers graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences. Unidata's mission is to support the Earth Science research and education community with data and tools for data access, analysis, and visualization. As a Unidata intern, you'll pursue the goal of adding innovative enhancements to data access, analysis, and visualization tools developed within Unidata.

Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2013 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2013, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Applications are invited from early career scientists to participate in the 2013 Pan American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) on Atmospheric Processes in Latin America and the Caribbean: Observations, Analysis, and Impacts — a two-week short course on atmospheric processes of Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia, from 27 May to 7 June 2013.