The Unidata Program receives the majority of its funding from the National Science Foundation. Every five years, the program submits a new proposal to the NSF, outlining past accomplishments and describing plans for future activities.

As Unidata entered the final year of the most recent NSF proposal period, which ended on March 31, 2019, Program Center staff and members of Unidata's governing committees engaged in countless conversations about the future direction of the program. The impact of existing programs, requests from community members for new or augmented services, and prognostications about the future needs of the geoscience educators and researchers all figured into the discussions. The resulting proposal, titled Unidata: Next-generation Data Services and Workflows to Advance Geoscience Research and Education, was awarded by NSF with an official start date of May 1, 2019.

The Unidata Program Center will be altering the IDD NIMAGE datastream to contain all of the GOES-16 and GOES-17 Level 2 image products that are currently being being sent in the IDD NOTHER and HDS datastreams.

We plan to begin distributing a reconstituted NIMAGE feed from our top level IDD relay clusters (idd.unidata.ucar.edu and iddb.unidata.ucar.edu) in the mid-June time frame.

The Unidata Program Center is happy to have three software development interns with us this summer. Click through to read their introductions.

Whether you like your weather data local, pushed to you by the Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM) through the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) project, or stored remotely and accessed on demand as needed, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW-AOS) has you covered.

The UW-AOS Department has been helping to make weather data available to the Unidata community since the early days of the IDD project. An upgraded ingest and relay cluster, made possible by funding from the 2018 Unidata Equipment Awards grant program, has now enabled UW-AOS to serve the GOES16 and GOES17 data along with everything else to additional downstream sites.

On March 25, the High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC) hosted a workshop on accessing climate data using THREDDS Data Servers. Ten faculty, staff, and students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln were in attendance and represented a wide variety of disciplines, including agriculture, climatology, and ecology. The workshop provided an opportunity for the participants to interact with data on a THREDDS Data Server and learn about netCDF data. For many, this was a brand new experience.