The Seventh Symposium on Advances in Modeling and Analysis Using Python, sponsored by the American Meteorological Society, and organized by the AMS Board on Environmental Information Processing Technologies, will be held 22–26 January 2017, as part of the 97th AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. Preliminary programs, registration, hotel, and general information will be posted on the AMS Web site in late-September 2016.

Abstract submissions for the Python Symposium should be submitted via the AMS web site by 3 August 2016.

Earlier this year, the Unidata Users Committee asked members of the Unidata community to participate in a survey regarding their use of scientific software packages, software training, and community services, and to favor us with their insights into possible future directions for the program. You can read an overview of the survey results in 2016 Community Survey Results.

While Unidata's governing committees and the Unidata Program Center staff will continue to analyze the survey comments in the process of crafting Unidata's next Strategic Plan, individual Program Center development groups are also using the survey as input into their own development plans. This series of articles provides responses from different development groups to comments or concerns raised by the survey. Under review in this article: Python activities at Unidata.

Unidata is pleased to announce the availability of the Python Data Access Framework (DAF). The DAF provides access to an AWIPS II Environmental Data EXchange (EDEX) server directly from Python code. Created by Unidata Program Center software engineer Michael James, the DAF strengthens Unidata's AWIPS II offerings by making it easier to retrieve data from the AWIPS II data storage system from outside the Common AWIPS Visualization Environment (CAVE).

Users have always been able to request real time NCEP/NWS weather data using AWIPS II, but now, with the addition of the Python DAF, users can request this data using only simple python commands.

Unidata Python tutorial at SEA 2016.

The 2016 UCAR Software Engineering Assembly (SEA) Software Engineering Conference and Tutorials (https://sea.ucar.edu/conference/2016) just wrapped up at UCAR's Center Green facility in Boulder, Colorado. The week long conference took place April 4–8, 2016, and focused on “Data Science for scientific disciplines.” Unidata staff were on hand, and on the final day, held a python tutorial titled “Visualizing meteorological data with Python: Use cases with Siphon and MetPy.” Over 40 people participated in the tutorial.

The Unidata Program Center has created a new mailing list for the users of Python in the Unidata community: python-users. The focus of the new list is questions and discussion around the Siphon and MetPy projects, although other topics relevant to the use of Python are welcome. For more information, please visit our mailing list page and look under "python-users".