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Unidata staffers Jeff McWhirter (on left) and Don Murray at the 2005 AGU meeting in San Francisco

Look for Unidata at the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting, December 11-15 in San Francisco. Staff members will be actively participating on several levels at the conference including paper and poster presentations and session chairing..

We invite you to browse the schedule of Unidata-related presentations.

It's worth pointing out that there are four LEAD-related presentations in Monday afternoon's Earth and Space Science Informatics General Contributions. Note also that Tom Baltzer, Unidata staff member and LEAD developer, will be demonstrating LEAD's capabilities at the UOP booth, number 420, throughout the meeting.

If you'd like to see how LEAD can help you search for and visualize data, select regions/times for making model runs on the TeraGrid, and visualize the results, as well as how its capabilities will be useful to you in your research and teaching activities, schedule a personalized LEAD demo by e-mailing Tom at tbaltzer@ucar.edu.Tom will be available from 9 am on Tuesday through Friday and again at 5pm on Tuesday and Thursday. There will also be signup sheets for you to indicate a time that you'd like a demo.

See you in San Francisco!

Unidata's 2006 Training Workshops attracted a record number of non-US residents--16 in all.

The visit's purpose for the five attendees from Africa was twofold: to attend radar training in RAL as well as the participation in the Unidata training workshops.

An additional significant result of their visit is that Unidata is now sending data on the IDD (see map) to the Met Service, and in the future the Met Service will become a data injection site on the IDD. At this time only one functioning radar exists in Mali, and the government is committed to purchasing and installing two more, which will provide additional opportunities for data injection.

The increase in foreign participation comes with benefits to the US community with the exchange of data and ideas. Increasing the dialogs may well provide opportunities for collaboration which could, in turn, yield significant societal benefits.

SOARS Student: Shanna-Shaye Forbes, a SOARS student who spent the summer at Unidata, received recognition for an Outstanding Student Poster award at the 2006 Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Conference in Tampa, Florida. Shanna-Shaye's poster on "Developing a C++ Interface for NetCDF-4" was an award winner in the computer science category. This is Shanna's second SACNAS award. She received the honor in 2005 as well. As we've noted, Unidata staff contribute time, energy, and expertise serving as mentors in the SOARS program during the summer months (and often beyond); and we are exceptionally proud when one of "our" students receives a distinctive award. Way to go, Shanna!

DeSouza Award: Mark the date January 18, 2007 on your calendars now. The Unidata Users Committee's DeSouza Award for 2007 will be awarded on that day at the AMS Annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas prior to the commencement of Thursday's IIPPS session. This will mark the seventh time the award has been made to a community member whose distinguished service has enlarged and enriched our community.

NOAA Workshop on Community Standards for Unstructured Grids: On October 16-17, Unidata hosted the "NOAA Workshop on Community Standards for Unstructured Grids" with 30 participants, to try to work out details for how to extend the CF conventions to represent unstructured grids. The workshop's goal was to agree upon a provisional profile (i.e. metadata standards) for unstructured grid data in netCDF based upon an evaluation of the existing candidate profiles and identification of issues. Among others, the workshop resulted in the creation of a Wiki that is maintained at LLNL.