Community Outreach and Service

• Publication of monthly online e-letter has continued.
  • Five e-letters have been published since (and including) April/May 2008, June, July, August, and September.
  • Featured sites in this period have been: Central Michigan University, University of Utah, Plymouth State, and CICESE [Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada] in Mexico. A few days later, CICESE's electronic newsletter featured an article about the Unidata CommunitE-letter piece.
• News Items published to the Unidata Home Page:
  • Attention Unidata GEMPAK/N-AWIPS users
  • Unidata 2013: A Transformative Community Facility for the Atmospheric and Related Sciences
  • Announcing a Latin American Data Workshop to be held August 21-23, 2008
  • Historic event: netCDF-4 released
  • GEMPAK NAWIPS Functionality
• Unidata Seminar Series. Four seminars, have been presented since the April 2008 Users Committee meeting.
  • John Caron, Unidata, "An update on the Scientific Data Type Layer of Unidata's Common Data Model"
  • Mark Parson, National Snow and Ice Data Center, "Securing the Legacy of the International Polar Year"
  • Randolph "Stick" Ware's seminar. Unidata served as host for this seminar, "A Microwave Weathercam"
  • DeSouza Award winner, Mark Laufersweiler, provided a presentation on his use of "Unidata software, data, and tools." Mark was the first DeSouza Award winner who presented a seminar during the Unidata Users Committee meeting.
  • Unidata seminars are webcast live, and archived for future viewing by community members.
• Participated in the following meetings:
  • Co-chair, AMS Annual Summer Meeting, The Intersection of Weather and Climate, 11-13 August 2008
  • Addressed the Undergraduate Leadership Conference, 16-20 June 2008
    Topic: Unidata technologies and the future of weather forecasting.
  • Keynote speaker at the Access Data Workshops in Portland Oregon April 30-May 3, 2008.
    Topic: How educators can better access and use data in the classroom.

Data Access and Distribution

• Data opportunities
  • We continue to work with COSMIC and the use of LDM for distribution of COSMIC data (Radio Occultation Data) to the .edu community.
  • The Users Committee conducted a survey of the community regarding CONDUIT data (see CONDUIT agenda item)