Jon Thielen

by Jon Thielen
2018 Unidata summer intern

During this past summer at Unidata, I worked primarily on MetPy by implementing cross section functionality and improving xarray integration. The ability to work with cross sections in MetPy has been frequently requested by users, and it was one of the major features present in GEMPAK but still missing from MetPy. Also, since MetPy is moving towards having xarray DataArrays and Datasets as its primary data structures, the development team thought it best to implement the new cross section interpolation and supporting calculations using xarray.

Hailey Johnson

by Hailey Johnson
2018 Unidata summer intern

During my time here at Unidata, I’ve focused on extending the THREDDS Data Server (TDS) web interface and services. I spend the first few weeks of the summer redesigning the interface to be more intuitive to end users and implementing UI changes using Thymeleaf HTML templating. The new TDS catalog pages are designed with a “plug-and-play” structure, allowing users to override or insert their own contributed HTML, which is processed by a server-side Thymeleaf template resolver.

By Joshua Clark

Editor's note: Josh Clark was a Unidata Summer Intern in 2015. He graduated from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) in the spring of 2015 with a B.S. in Meteorology, and is headed to the graduate program at San Jose State's Fire Weather Research Lab starting in the Fall of 2015.

An example EdexPy interface (click to enlarge)

It is hard to believe my time here at Unidata has come and gone so quickly! Next week, I imagine it will be back to the “harsh” reality of being a student — sitting on a beach somewhere near Monterey or perhaps fly fishing the Sierras over the next twenty days awaiting the start of my first year of graduate school at San Jose State. What a terrible reality that will be!

This experience at Unidata and UCAR has been an incredible opportunity and I am privileged to have been afforded these ten weeks. When I started here, I envisioned an entirely different internship than what previous interns had completed. Rather than developing one particular project, I focused my time on gaining a greater understanding of software engineering as a whole and contributing to existing Unidata projects. I found a comfortable spot working with Unidata Python developers Ryan May and Sean Arms, and within one week I had learned a great deal about unit testing, code health, automated testing, and version control. Later, I would implement these principles in my first Python library, MesoPy.