The Unidata Program receives the majority of its funding from the National Science Foundation. Every five years, the program submits a new proposal to the NSF, outlining past accomplishments and describing plans for future activities.

As Unidata entered the final year of the most recent NSF proposal period, which ended on March 31, 2019, Program Center staff and members of Unidata's governing committees engaged in countless conversations about the future direction of the program. The impact of existing programs, requests from community members for new or augmented services, and prognostications about the future needs of the geoscience educators and researchers all figured into the discussions. The resulting proposal, titled Unidata: Next-generation Data Services and Workflows to Advance Geoscience Research and Education, was awarded by NSF with an official start date of May 1, 2019.

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.