The nominating process is now open for the International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data System (WDS) Data Stewardship Award. The award highlights exceptional contributions to the improvement of scientific data stewardship by early career researchers.

Russ DeSouza with students

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. 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 2017 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 2017, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Daryl Herzmann

Daryl Herzmann of Iowa State University has been awarded the 2016 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.”

Among other activities, Herzmann administers the Iowa Environmental Mesonet website (http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/), and provides a Local Data Manager (LDM) feed of the data to community members. He has been instrumental in mantaining a widely-used archive of case study data in GEMPAK and McIDAS AREA formats. In recent years, he has been an advocate for bringing Python-based workflows into the atmospheric science community; his presentation “Web Services & Python use for Meteorology” at the 2012 Unidata Users Workshop helped inspire efforts by Unidata Program Center developers to expand the use of Python in the community.

Thanks to a 2015 Unidata Community Equipment Award grant, combined with matching funds from Plymouth State University, students working in the weather lab in Plymouth State's Department of Atmospheric Science & Chemistry now have 21 new workstations on which to use the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) and AWIPS II.

During the 2015-16 academic year, the workstations were used heavily by students in a variety of classes, including Synoptic Meteorology, Atmospheric Physics, Instrumentation & Observations, Mesoscale Meteorology, Numerical Weather Prediction, Satellite & Radar Meteorology, and our meteorological computer application class, which provides in depth instruction with IDV and ISL. Furthermore, students used the workstations to produce scholarly research in areas such as atmospheric rivers, orographic precipitation, and explosive extratropical cyclone intensification over the North Pacific.