Tyler Wixtrom joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 30, 2017. Tyler has just graduated from Valparaiso University with a Bachelor of Science in Meteorology and will be starting work toward a Master's degree in Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University in the fall. His main interests are in Numerical Weather Prediction and the transition of research to operational applications, as well as in the development of software tools in support of forecasters and researchers. Tyler will be working in development of the MetPy package, with the goal of adding user-friendly functionality for vertical interpolation to various coordinate systems, such as isentropic or isobaric coordinates.

The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences.

Satellite images are really cool.

Following on the heels of NOAA's successful launch of the GOES-16 Earth observing satellite in November 2016, Unidata is moving ahead with plans to launch its own orbiter early next year. Unlike GOES-16, which provides a wide variety of observations including rapidly refreshing a full-disk imagery of the Western hemisphere, the first Geostationary Unidata Observing Satellite (GUOS-1) will focus its instruments on observations of the area immediately surrounding the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado.

John Leeman joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on January 30th, 2017. John obtained bachelor's degrees in meteorology and geophysics from the University of Oklahoma in 2012, and a PhD in geoscience from Penn State in 2017. He has worked in research fields ranging from gas hydrate thermodynamics to SODAR and boundary layer instrumentation, and did his doctoral work in earthquake physics. John's software development experience includes work on the seafloor process simulator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and telemetry analysis tools for NASA's Morpheus lunar lander project. The common thread amongst all of these projects was “the development of new tools and software to attack previously intractable problems.”

As a researcher himself, John brings first-hand knowledge of how scientists want to interact with their research tools to Unidata. He joined the Unidata Program Center because, he says, “making well tested and reliable tools with which to conduct reproducible science is probably the largest challenge and most needed area of innovation in research today.”

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, was held January 22-26 in Seattle, Washington. 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.

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 American Geophysical Union 2016 Fall meeting, December 12-16 2016, in San Francisco. The schedule below lists specific sessions at which UPC staff will be presenting or in attendance. See the AGU Fall meeting Scientific Program for additional information on the sessions.

In addition to the talks and poster sessions listed below, Unidata staff will be spending time at the UCAR Community Programs booth (#404) in the Exhibit Hall. Stop by to chat or see Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer in action.