In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of February, 2018.

In case you missed it — here's a recap of news from the Unidata Program Center for the month of January, 2018.

Unidata's AMS booth

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, was held January 7-11 in Austin, Texas. We were happy to see many of the Unidata community members participating in the meeting at our booth in the exhibit hall, and to meet so many prospective community members at the AMS Student Conference.

Read on for some highlights from the conference as recalled by UPC staff members who attended.

Cece Hedrick

Cece Hedrick joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on October 16th, 2017 as a software developer. Her first day at the office coincided with the joint meeting of Unidata's Users' and Strategic Advisory Committees, so … we pretty much threw her in the deep end of the pool. On the bright side, Cece got an instant introduction to the community we're working for.

Cece studied astrophysics and computer science at the University of Nebraska. As an astronomer she has worked in a wide range of research categories from supermassive black holes, circumstellar disks, and symbiotic stars to the Martian atmosphere as part of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. As a computer scientist she has also explored a wide range of research topics, such as, bioinformatics, modeling and simulation for war gaming, and user experience/human computer interaction within the learning sciences. As a software developer, Cece has previously worked on military secure messaging and data transfer solutions, cable television software product continuous integration, and space weather prediction and analysis software.

Hurricane Irma

Will virtual reality become a useful tool for the atmospheric sciences? If you're attending the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (December 11-15, 2017 in New Orleans, LA), be sure to drop by the UCAR Community Programs booth in the exhibition hall for some virtual reality demonstrations showing both observational and forecast data from hurricane Irma, which barrelled through the Caribbean in September 2017.

Unidata staff members Ward Fisher and Jeff Weber have been working with scientists at the Geological Survey of the Netherlands to figure out how to use netCDF datasets in the Survey's virtual reality system. Together with software developers from the research organization TNO in the Netherlands, this group has put together a visualization of hurricane Irma that can be can be investigated and manipulated (i.e. thin sliced, filtered, scaled, etc.) in real-time by multiple users with HTC Vive devices.