The UPC will not be moving to St. Cloud, MN.

After receiving clarification from the National Science Foundation, the Unidata Program Center has cancelled its plans to move its operations to the town of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

"We were a bit puzzled when we heard that the NSF wanted Unidata to focus its energies on moving to St. Cloud," says Unidata Program Director Mohan Ramamurthy. "Frankly, we were a bit worried about losing the high-speed Internet2 connectivity we enjoy at UCAR, but NSF is our primary sponsor, so we went along with it. And the proximity to St. Cloud State University would certainly be an asset to us."

Josh Young

Josh Young joined the Unidata Program Center as the Community Services Manager on March 10, 2014. He comes to Unidata from the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C. where he served as the Program Manager for the Interagency Ocean Observation Committee Support Office (IOOC SO). At the IOOC SO, he supported member agencies in coordinating federal ocean observing and engaging the broader science community.

Josh first encountered Unidata products at the IOOC SO, where one of his duties was supporting the Data Management and Communications Steering Team. From the beginning, it was obvious that the Steering Team thought highly of Unidata, but all of the technical terms that members used were very unfamiliar and confusing. After several years, Josh became thoroughly accustomed to being confused during data-management conversations.

Unidata community members:

The Unidata apache web server account was exploited through a vulnerability in a cgi-bin script on February 20, 2014. A fair bit of community user information was accessed, including website account email addresses and their associated passwords in encrypted hash form. We need to assume the hacker(s) are in the process of combing through this information and will be attempting to crack and use passwords found.

If you use a common password for multiple accounts including Unidata's web site, we STRONGLY recommend that you change your password for those other accounts immediately.

Please note: we will be enforcing a reset of Unidata website account passwords and password reminders. Our web site's login page will walk you through the procedure to reset these values.

In addition, we recommend disabling/removing the 'datasets.cgi' script should you be running it on your server.

We profusely apologize for this security breach and stand ready to help you in any way that we can.

Please send any questions/comments to Unidata User Support <support@unidata.ucar.edu>

This is a serious situation; please take appropriate action immediately.

Unidata's AMS booth

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia hosted nearly 3500 attendees, who fortuitously missed the serious winter storms that occurred shortly before and after the conference. 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.

Ryan May

Ryan May joined the Unidata Program Center software development staff on January 6th, 2013. He comes to Unidata from the University of Oklahoma, where he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in Meteorology, and where he'll be finishing up his doctoral dissertation "sometime later this year."