In the spring of 2019, Northern Illinois University (NIU) applied for and received a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant for a project titled “Bringing back weather.niu.edu: A multifaced server at Northern Illinois University.” The NIU Meteorology department (now Geographic and Atmospheric Sciences) has been involved in the dissemination of meteorological data since the late 1990s, when Russell L. DeSouza Award winner Mr. Gilbert Sebenste set up the “NIU Weather” server at weather.niu.edu. The server relayed data to dozens of Universities via the LDM and had a popular “storm machine” website that provided some of the earliest model forecast soundings. After Mr. Sebenste's departure from NIU in 2017, the server was taken off-line.

The 2019 Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Diversity in STEM Conference was held October 31 - November 2 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. This is the largest multidisciplinary and multicultural STEM diversity event in the country, and Unidata was fortunate to be able to send staff member Jeff Weber to attend. Jeff was able to make valuable connections for Unidata and for the UCAR Community Programs (UCP) in general.

The Unidata Program Center will be altering the IDD NIMAGE datastream to contain all of the GOES-16 and GOES-17 Level 2 image products that are currently being being sent in the IDD NOTHER and HDS datastreams.

We plan to begin distributing a reconstituted NIMAGE feed from our top level IDD relay clusters (idd.unidata.ucar.edu and iddb.unidata.ucar.edu) in the mid-June time frame.

Registration will be opening shortly for Unidata's 2018 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features courses on Unidata's display and analysis packages MetPy, IDV, and AWIPS, as well as courses on data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and netCDF.

Additional Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been created for Unidata technologies. We encourage you to use the DOIs when citing or otherwise referring to these technologies, because they provide a mechanism by which the information referred to can be found even if the web address underlying the DOI changes over time.

DOIs are strings of characters assigned by a registering organization to uniquely idenfity a digital resource such as a document, software package, data set, or other electronic “object.” Once a DOI is registered, metadata about the object can be associated with the identifier and maintained separately from the object itself, so that changes to the object's location can be reflected in the DOI's metadata.