This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, was held January 22-26 in Seattle, Washington. 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.

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.

The National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. Proposals for grants supporting two types of EarthCube activities are due by March 14, 2017.

The National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative is a community-driven project aimed at creating an integrated environment for the sharing of geoscience data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner. All members of the geoscience community are invited to participate in the 2017 EarthCube All Hands Meeting (AHM), to be held June 7-9, 2017 in Seattle, Washington.

In preparation for a routine review of the Unidata Program by our sponsors at the National Science Foundation, we are collecting anecdotes that illustrate the ways in which Unidata's activities have benefitted you, your research, your teaching, your students, or your community.

If you've got a story that hinges on data you received through the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system, or on visualizations created with the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), or your experiences with AWIPS, GEMPAK, or metPy, tell us!

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.

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to welcome new members to the program's governing committees. Committee members normally serve three-year terms; terms are finishing up for one member of the Users committee and two members of the Strategic Advisory committee. Additionally, a seat on the Strategic Advisory Committee that has been empty since the fall of 2014 is being filled. New members and those finishing their terms will overlap for one meeting: September 26-27 for the Users Committee and October 6-7 for the Strategic Advisory Committee.

The UPC staff looks forward to working with our new committee members, and to having all the current members of both committees at the Program Center in Boulder, Colorado this fall.

A workshop on The Rescue of Data At Risk will be held in Boulder, Colorado, on 8-9 September 2016, in association with International Data Week, taking place the following week in Denver.

The workshop is being organized by the joint CODATA Task Group for Data At Risk and the RDA Interest Group for Data Rescue, and is being hosted by NCAR.

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Central Operations is looking to hire an Information Technology Specialist. The position is in College Park, MD.

CAPE plot from Millersville PECAN data.

In the summer of 2015, from June 1st to July 15th, a fleet of scientists set out each evening in the Midwest. Their goal? To gain insight on the nocturnal mesoscale convective storms (MCS's) that plague America's heartland. While MCS's are necessary for irrigation and the replenishing of aquifers, often these storms can become vicious; especially at night when they are least detected.

With the implementation of the field experiment PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night) scientists from eight research laboratories and fourteen Universities including Millersville University of Pennsylvania hope to gain insight to better predict these nocturnal storms. After the data were collected, the Unidata Program Center (UPC) worked closely with Millersville students and academic staff to help standardize their PECAN study data.