Students in the University of Salento's Advanced Data Management course

Climate Change research is becoming an ever more data intensive and oriented scientific activity. Petabytes of climate data are continuously produced, delivered, accessed, and processed by scientists and researchers at multiple sites at an international level. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) and the University of Salento in Italy are using equipment purchased with a Unidata Community Equipment Grant to help students study climate change issues at both global and regional (Mediterranean area) scales.

Video display wall at the NOAA/CDC Lab in Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) maintains a repository of climate datasets that is used daily by researchers and educators at CIRES and around the world. These datasets are being used to answer questions about the Earth's climate system, such as the cause and nature of extreme climate events like the 2010 Russian Heat Wave. We received funds from the 2011 Unidata Community Equipment Awards program to purchase a new server to enhance and expand our existing THREDDS Data Server (TDS) capabilities and establish a RAMADDA server at the CDC in order to provide end-to-end data services that facilitate research and education in the climate sciences.

Student using the THREDDS server to acquire Landsat imagery.

New Mexico State University's community data portal uses Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) Data Server and Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA) server applications. The portal makes data sets that have been archived at NMSU's Center for Applied Remote Sensing in Agriculture, Meteorology and Environment (CARSAME) and New Mexico Climate Center available to the public.

Unidata's LDM, THREDDS, RAMADDA, and other technologies play integral roles in Pennsylvania State University's provision of meteorological data to their own students and researchers and to the wider university community. A 2011 Community Equipment Award helped Penn State upgrade some of their servers to be more capable and reliable.

Unidata is happy to announce the Community Equipment Award recipients for 2012. Three institutions received funding this year:

• Iowa State University
• Valparaiso University
• University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

The Unidata Program Center would like to remind members of our community that the deadline for the 2012 Unidata Community Equipment Awards is March 9, 2012.

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 2012, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

Unidata offers equipment grants to support a variety of projects

The Unidata Program Center is pleased to announce the opening of the 2012 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 2012, a total of $100,000 is available for awards; proposals for amounts up to $20,000 will be considered.

ISU student Ryan Lueck uses the IDV to display data from ISU's THREDDS server.

The Iowa State University Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences maintains an extensive archive of meteorological data, including textual information (severe weather statements and other National Weather Service products), numerical model output in gempak format, gif images of weather maps created daily since 2006, and gempak-format surface and upper air data going back to 1933, much of which was provided to us by NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory. For the past year or two, we have made NMQ estimates of precipitation available on the archive as well.

Unidata is happy to announce the Community Equipment Award recipients for 2011. Eight institutions received funding this year:

• New Mexico State University
• Pennsylvania State University
• Rutgers University
• San Jose State University
• Texas A&M University
• University of Colorado / CIRES
• University of Salento & CMCC, Italy
• University of South Florida

In the spring of 2010, the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) at the University at Albany, State University of New York received funds from Unidata's annual Community Equipment Awards program to renovate the department's electronic map room. As a result, during the summer of 2010 our department purchased eight Dell Optiplex 780 desktop computers with dual-quad core CPUs (thus eight CPUs are available per unit) and eight GB of RAM.  The machines were received too late in the summer to be ready for the fall semester, but were in place for the start of the second semester in January, 2011. Seven of the systems sit in the DAES electronic maproom, while the eighth resides in the Principal Investigator's office, for use as a development machine as well as an emergency hot spare.