Reminder: The deadline for submitting proposals for this year's Community Equipment Awards is March 16, 2018.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2018 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 2018, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Do you know someone in the Unidata community who has been actively involved and helpful to you and other Unidata members? Perhaps this is someone who volunteers to assist others, contributes software, or makes suggestions that are generally useful for the community.

The Unidata Users Committee invites you to submit nominations for the Russell L. DeSouza Award for Outstanding Community Service by 23 March 2018. This Community Service Award honors individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences. Honorees personify Unidata's ideal of a community that shares ideas, data, and software through computing and networking technologies.

Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2018 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 2018, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Past recipients of Unidata equipment awards have used the grants to procure equipment for data sharing, to create interactive data visualization laboratories, and to encourage the use of Unidata software packages in research and education.

Kevin Tyle

Kevin Tyle of the University at Albany, State University of New York has been awarded the 2017 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

Tyle has been active in the Unidata community for many years, serving on the Unidata Users Committee from 2009 through 2015 (as committee chair 2012-2015), and joining the Strategic Advisory Committee in late 2015. He is currently involved in the NSF Big Weather Web project, which aims to make big data infrastructure affordable and adequate for university members of the Numerical Weather Prediction community by combining virtualization, cloud computing and storage, and big data management techniques.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have used funds made available through Unidata's Community Equipment Awards program to prototype a system for using cloud-based resources to provide access to 3D-visualization software. Their project, titled “A Prototype Cloud-Based Visualization System for Unidata Applications,” focused on running Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) on a remote (“cloud”) system and making it available on multiple remote clients.