The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), in collaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Innocentive, had announced the OpenNEX challenge and workshop. They invite the general public, climate scientists, software engineers, and data analysts to design and implement concepts that enable climate resilience. There will be $60,000 in prize money available for participants as a reward for their innovations.

The first stage of the challenge runs July 1 through August 1, 2014, and offers as much as $10,000 in awards for ideas on novel uses of the large collection of climate and Earth science satellite data sets — including global land surface images, vegetation conditions, climate observations, and climate projections — that are being made available to participants. The second stage, beginning in August, will offer between $30,000 and $50,000 in awards for the development of an application or algorithm that promotes climate resilience using the OpenNEX data, based on ideas from the first stage of the challenge. NASA will announce the overall challenge winners in December.

Read more in NASA's news release and on the OpenNEX web site.

The National Weather Service is investigating ways to make greater amounts of data available to the geoscience community. Read on for additional information and ways to provide your feedback.

On Friday, March 28, 2014 the Unidata Program Center (UPC) updated the demonstration THREDDS Data Server (TDS) running on thredds.ucar.edu to version 4.5 of the TDS software. After encountering some issues with the updated version, including problems with community members' IDV bundles not loading as expected from thredds.ucar.edu, UPC staff reverted the demonstration server to version 4.3 on April 1st.

UPC staff had became aware that TDS version 4.3 running on thredds.ucar.edu was not keeping some dataset indices up to date automatically. This situation required manual intervention by UPC staff to keep the indices updated, which, coupled with changes in UPC security procedures following the intrusion on February 20, 2014, increased the urgency of releasing a new TDS version that fixed the problem. After internal testing convinced us that TDS version 4.5 was functioning properly, we followed the normal procedure of updating UPC servers (specifically thredds.ucar.edu) before releasing the package to other sites. This staged release process normally allows us to find and fix "real world" issues that are not caught by internal testing.

Shortly after 0 UTC (18:00 MDT) on Saturday, March 21, 2014, the contents of the Internet Data Distribution FNEXRAD (NEXRAD Level III national composites) and UNIWISC (aka McIDAS Satellite Imagery Sectors) datastreams were updated with new products. Prior to the update, the FNEXRAD products were created on motherlode.ucar.edu and the UNIWISC products were created on unidata2.ssec.wisc.edu. Both datastreams are now being created in a 64-bit CentOS 6.5 Virtual Machine in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Read on for a brief overview of the contents of each datastream with special emphasis on new or altered products.

The majority of data streams made available via the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system currently remain available to Unidata community members despite the closing of US government facilities. As a UCAR facilitiy, the Unidata Program Center itself has not been directly affected by the shutdown, although if the budget impasse continues for more than a few weeks there could be reductions in staff time.

As of 2 October 2013, only one data stream normally available via the IDD is affected; a portion of the Suominet data that flows through NOAA servers (part of the CORS network) will be unavailable until the servers are restarted.

Currently, the CONDUIT data streams from NCEP are still functioning. We have not been notified about whether they will continue to operate.

UPC staff are currently unaffected and available for support questions and all normal activities.