Russell Manser

Russell Manser joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 18, 2020. Russell recently defended his Master's thesis in Atmospheric Science at Texas Tech University and will be graduating toward the end of the summer. He'll be pursuing a PhD in Atmospheric Science at Texas Tech this fall.

Drew Camron

Drew Camron joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on February 18th, 2020. Drew majored in Meteorology and Physics with a minor in Mathematics at Mississippi State University before coming to the University of Colorado for graduate studies in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He received his Master's degree in 2019.

Drew's graduate work included modeling atmospheric gravity waves before shifting to study modeled and observed satellite measurements of climate-scale precipitation patterns over the Greenland Ice Sheet. But his scientific work showed him a parallel path. “My time in school taught me that my motivation and excitement came from developing tools (especially software) that can help teach or enable other people to do exciting science,” he says.

Unidata's Science Gateway can provide cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses. Because many universities are responding to local public health mandates related to the COVID-19 epidemic by transitioning to the use of remote-learning techniques and online-only courses, Unidata is encouraging community members to evaluate whether this no-cost resource can benefit their students during the Spring term.

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held 12-16 January 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. Unidata Program Center staff were happy to be able to attend as presenters of talks and posters, conveners of sessions, and facilitators of workshops and short courses for students, educators, and researchers. Staff members also spent time meeting community members in the new exhibit hall booth bringing together a variety of UCAR and NCAR programs in one space. As always, we were also glad to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.

With so much going on at the conference, we can't cover everything here. Instead, we present some highlights as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.

Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 100th annual American Meteorology Society meeting, 12-16 January 2020 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Things are a little different with the Unidata booth in the Exhibit hall this year. Unidata staff will be spending time at the larger, combined UCAR/NCAR booth (#309) — stop by to talk with us and see what else is happening at UCAR. 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. As always, you can talk with the developers about what's coming up and what you'd like to see.