Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the American Geophysical Union 2019 Fall meeting, December 9-13 2019, in San Francisco, CA. Read on to see specific sessions at which UPC staff will be presenting or in attendance.

In addition to presenting talks and poster sessions, Unidata staff will be spending time at the UCAR/NCAR booth in the Exhibit Hall. Stop by for one of the scheduled demonstrations of Unidata software packages or just to chat about your data needs, summer internship opportunities, or the Unidata Equipment Awards!

Version 4.7.3 of the netCDF-C library is now available.

Changes in the netCDF-C library include (but are not limited to):

• Fixed an issue where installs from tarballs would not properly compile in parallel environments.
• The library was modified so that rewriting the same attribute happens without deleting the attribute, to avoid a limit on how many times this may be done in HDF5.
• Add a dispatch version number to netcdf_meta.h and libnetcdf.settings, in case we decide to change dispatch table in future.
• Now testing that endianness can only be set on atomic ints and floats.
• Fix for subtle error involving var and unlimited dim of the same name, but unrelated, in netCDF-4.
• Update for attribute documentation.
• Corrected assignment of anonymous (a.k.a. phony) dimensions in an HDF5 file. Now when a dataset uses multiple dimensions of the same size, netcdf assumes they are different dimensions.

Unidata offers computer equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2020 Unidata Community Equipment Awards solicitation. Created under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, Unidata equipment awards are intended to encourage new members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the geosciences to join the Unidata community, and to encourage existing members to continue their active participation, enhancing the community process. For 2020, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Note:
In keeping with Unidata's most recent proposal to the National Science Foundation for continued program funding, additional emphasis will be placed on providing support for institutions serving populations that are underrepresented in the broad geoscience community. Unidata is dedicated to broadening participation by minority serving institutions, and we particularly encourage small institutions, academic departments that have not previously submitted proposals to this program, and programs outside Unidata's traditional atmospheric sciences community to apply.

The 2019 Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Diversity in STEM Conference was held October 31 - November 2 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. This is the largest multidisciplinary and multicultural STEM diversity event in the country, and Unidata was fortunate to be able to send staff member Jeff Weber to attend. Jeff was able to make valuable connections for Unidata and for the UCAR Community Programs (UCP) in general.

For more than 30 years, meteorology students, researchers, and operational practitioners have used the GEMPAK (GEneral Meteorology PAcKage) software package for data analysis and visualization of a diverse set of atmospheric science datasets. Initially developed in the late 1980s to produce forecast and analysis graphics for the National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, GEMPAK has been superseded by more modern software in operational settings, and has not been actively developed by the Weather Service since 2008. Within the education and research community, however, GEMPAK’s potent combination of powerful analysis and visualization tools, ease of use, and low cost (it’s free) has led to its continued use, despite its age.

Unidata’s MetPy project aims to help the academic community modernize its software toolset by bringing the best features of GEMPAK into the burgeoning world of scientific Python.