You may already know that 2009 marks Unidata's 25th birthday. We've been celebrating in small steps since the beginning of the calendar year. In fact, the cake pictured in the image highlight above was a focal point of the Users Workshop's evening reception.

Come October we will mark the occasion by holding a day and a half program that will include reminiscences from founding fathers and early community activists, and reflections on what the community created a quarter of a century ago. Not surprisingly, the program has experienced a great many changes since 1984. We've grown the community both in numbers, around 242 individual participants in the early years to over 1500 organizations according to recent data.We've carefully and organically grown in terms of disciplines represented in it as well. In addition, our Network Common Data Form (netCDF), is widely used both nationally and internationally.

Although we think our record speaks for itself, there's always room for improvement. And, we'll be looking for some fun memories to surface during the 15-16 October event, even as we contemplate what the future holds for the program.

We've said it before, but it can't be repeated too often: we are proud of the work we do here at Unidata, and we gratefully acknowledge our partners in each endeavor, our user community.

Additional details will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead.

We are pleased to welcome new members to our two governing committees, the Policy Committee and the Users Committee.

New on the Policy Committee this year will be Jim Steenburgh, University of Utah and Gary Lackmann, North Carolina State University. David Tarboton will remain on the committee for his second three-year appointment. Both Jim and Gary have served as Users Committee chair, and in that capacity, have attended Policy Committee meetings as the Users Committee representative. All three of these appointments will be able to hit the ground running at the fall meeting.

On the Users Committee, Tom Whittaker (University of Wisconsin), who is presently the Users Committee Technical Representative and chair of the IDV Steering Committee, will assume the role of its chair. New members will be Anne Case Hanks, University of Louisiana-Monroe, Steve Lazarus, Florida Institute of Technology, Patrick Market, University of Missouri-Columbia, and Kevin Tyle, University at Albany, SUNY. Rich Signell, USGS/WHOI and Brent Gordon, NOAA/NCEP will be agency representatives to the committee. As we welcome new members to both committees, we acknowledge the contributions and participation of outgoing members, Rich Clark and Rudy Husar on the Policy Committee and Eugene Cordero and Scott Rochette on the Users Committee.

Both new and outgoing committee members will be in attendance at the fall meeting, being held in conjunction with the 25 Anniversary event 15-16 October in Boulder.

The selection process for new committee members begins with the sending of a call for nominations for both committees from the Policy Committee chair. Appointments are made for a three-year term. Nominations for the Users Committee student member are solicited in the spring. The Committee seeks nominations of Graduate Students who have completed at least one year of study, use Unidata software, and hold a strong interest in the Unidata program.

Once again we remind you that the committees represent everyone in the community. Please contact members of either committee if you have questions you'd like answered or to express your concerns or wishes for future changes. This is the Users Committee contact list, and here is the the list for the Policy Committee.

Training Workshops
Our annual Training Workshops are presently in progress. We will welcome a total 91 participants representing five countries other than the U.S., and 21 educational, 14 government, and four commercial groups. The workshops are a time of great activity in the program center. As well, they provide an excellent opportunity for staff to interact and get acquainted with users who're out there in the trenches using the software and tools that are the core of the Unidata endeavor.

Seminar
Unidata's seminar series is another pathway to integrating our users and the program center. Yesterday we welcomed Sylvie Lamy-Thepaut of the European Center for Medium Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) who made a presentation entitled The challenges of the ECMWF graphics packages. The presentation was webcast live, and that webcast is now available in the webcast archive at rtsp://real.ucar.edu/qtencoder/ecmwf.sdp.