The American Geophysical Union will be conducting a hybrid in-person and virtual conference for its 2024 Fall meeting, December 9-13 2024, with live events taking place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Several NSF Unidata staff members will be presenting as part of the AGU Scientific Program; a schedule of their talks and posters is included in the article.

Jim Steenburgh from the University of Utah has been awarded the 2024 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the NSF Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “substantive and sustained contributions of energy and expertise to the geosciences community that reflect the ideals of the NSF Unidata Program's mission” to better serve the geosciences.

Several current and former NSF Unidata Program Center staff members have been recognized with the American Geophysical Union's 2024 Open Science Recognition Prize for their work as part of a team of Major Contributors to the CF Conventions.

The Unidata Program Center's two summer student interns — Ana Castaneda Montoya from the University of Michigan and Leo Matak from the University of Houston — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 31, 2024.

Ana Castaneda Montoya

As part of my summer of 2024 internship I had the privilege of getting involved with some of NSF Unidata's Python projects. My work ranged from creating educational tutorials to adding new functionalities to existing libraries, enhancing the resources available to the community.

Leo Matak

I would like to begin by saying that this internship has definitely been one of the top highlights of my Ph.D. journey. I spent most of my working hours implementing the idea of server-side virtual data processing. This means that data on the THREDDS Data Servers (TDS) could be virtually processed without actually modifying the data. As such, the data integrity would remain intact, but it could be optimized for ML/AI.

As part of its data-driven mission, I-GUIDE (the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment), supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, tackles fundamental scientific and societal challenges focused on sustainability, from climate change and biodiversity loss to food and water insecurity. I-GUIDE Forum 2024, to be held in Jackson, Wyoming October 14-16, 2024, is designed as a conference series to bring together domain science researchers, artificial intelligence (AI) and data scientists, cyberinfrastructure experts, and educators from across academia, government, and industry.

Ana Castaneda Montoya

Ana Castaneda Montoya joined the NSF Unidata Program Center as a student summer intern on May 20, 2024; she received her Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Texas at Dallas the same week. She will be starting her graduate studies at the University of Michigan in August, where she'll pursue a PhD in Climate Science.

Leo Matak

Leo Matak joined the NSF Unidata Program Center as a student summer intern on May 20, 2024. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Houston, where he is part of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics lab, focusing on atmospheric boundary layer dynamics.

A new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded faculty travel grant program will support up to 50 early-to-mid career faculty from under-resourced U.S. undergraduate-focused institutions, such as Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and community colleges (2YCs) to attend the fall AGU24 annual meeting in Washington, D.C.