In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly three hundred and fifty users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the fall 2020 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata's resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

Tiffany Meyer joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on May 18th, 2020. Before joining Unidata, Tiffany had been at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) — a collaborative research facility sponsored by the University of Oklahoma — for the past 8 years. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a Master of Science degree in Atmospheric Science with a focus on lightning from Colorado State University.

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Unidata Program Center is working with three software development interns via a “virtual internship” program this summer. Even though we're not in the office, we're happy to have these three students with us for the summer of 2020. Click through to read their introductions.

Lauren Prox

Lauren Prox joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 18, 2020. Lauren graduated from George Mason University's Atmospheric Science Program in the spring of 2020 with a focus in Computational Atmospheric Science. She plans to enter a graduate program in Geospatial Intelligence in the fall, but this summer she'll be focusing on contributing to the netCDF project, where she is excited to enhance the tools researchers use to share their data and collaborate with other scientists.

Caitlyn McAllister

Caitlyn McAllister joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 18, 2020. She is a rising senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, majoring in Meteorology and with minor concentration in Computer Science.