Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 99th annual American Meteorology Society meeting, 6-10 January 2019 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Unidata will be in Booth 416 in the exhibit hall; feel free to stop by to talk with us. The booth will feature live, hands-on demonstrations of Unidata software and services, including a look at the current state of the AWIPS, IDV, MetPy, and THREDDS Data Server packages. Come and talk with the developers about what's coming up and what you'd like to see.

Read on for a schedule that lists selected sessions at which Unidata staff (and summer interns) will be presenting or attending. Unidata will also be at table C-8 at the Student Conference Career Fair, on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

A map discussion with visuals courtesy of Python.

The meteorology curriculum at Valparaiso University (VU) is continuously evolving as new technology arises, and this includes Python. Python is becoming a staple in many VU meteorology courses, where an ever-increasing number of packages and libraries are in use. Adding a new programming language to the educational mix can create a steep learning curve for college students who lack a programming background, but we feel that an early introduction to Python helps to prepare students for immersion into the job market or further education in graduate school.

Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2019 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2019, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Past recipients of Unidata equipment awards have used the grants to procure equipment for data sharing, to create interactive data visualization laboratories, and to encourage the use of Unidata software packages in research and education. Read on for information about areas that will be given special consideration for the 2019 grants.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) WMO Global Campus is the collaborative network of WMO Member institutions and National Meteorological Hydrological Services involved in the development and delivery of education and training. Its goal is to address the evolving global priorities for learning. It is the fruit of the synergies, sharing and cooperation within this community of institutions. In keeping with the concept of a WMO Global Campus as a community of practice, WMO is initiating the publication of a volume of short papers describing case studies of innovations implemented by partners in the Education and Training Programme (ETRP).

The 11th Annual International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE 11) will take place 24-27 September, 2019, in Florence, Italy. The conference will include a scientific program with technical paper sessions, invited talks, joint sessions with sister organizations, panels, an exhibition, and social events. The theme of the 2019 event is “Digital Earth in a Transformed Society,” celebrating and investigating the virtual representation of our planet as a multidisciplinary collaborative effort that engages different sciences (e.g. Earth, Space, Information, and Human sciences) to monitor and forecast natural and human phenomena.