The Unidata Program Center's three summer student interns — Jessica Blunt from the University of Oklahoma, Max Grover from the University of Illinois, and Aodhan Sweeney from the University of Washington — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 31, 2019. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.

Zach Bruick

Zach Bruick joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on June 3, 2019 as a Software Engineer. After finishing his Master's degree in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in May, he has jumped in to apply his talents to Unidata's mix of science, software development, and training activities.

Zach earned a Bachelor's degree in Meteorology — along with a major in Geography and a minor in Mathematics — from Valparaiso University before heading to Colorado State. He first encountered Unidata while working with GEMPAK and the LDM as part of Valparaiso's undergraduate meteorology curriculum, and he's been immersed in the scientific Python ecosystem since his Junior year. In addition to his university coursework, Zach has honed his scientific skills through student research and internship positions with NASA and NOAA.

The Unidata Program Center is hiring! We are looking for a scientific software developer to join our team as a technical lead in creating and maintaining software and data services to support the geosciences.

We are looking for a lead software developer to help us help our community of scientists access the Earth system science data that fuels their research. You'll collaborate with other Unidata developers to test, support, maintain, and develop Unidata software products and real-time data streams. You will work closely with end-users and other Unidata developers to identify community needs for software and data, and participate in Unidata’s efforts to meet those needs. This position will focus on development of and support for the AWIPS package.

Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana will be hosting a Unidata Regional Software Training Workshop August 12-13, 2019. Unidata software developers will be leading the two-day Python-focused workshop, which will cover the use of the MetPy and Siphon packages in the context of atmospheric science. A basic familiarity with Python is assumed — check out the Unidata Online Python Training site for a refresher.

Unidata holds regional workshops in part to facilitate easy access to software training for those who may not be able to travel to training workshops held at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado. Attendance is explicitly not limited to Valparaiso students and staff; we encourage those within easy travel distance to consider attending.

A number of new screencasts describing concepts and techniques related to using Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) have been posted to the Unidata YouTube channel. The videos were created as part of Unidata 2019 intern Jessica Blunt's summer projects, and cover a variety of basic IDV tasks using the most recent IDV release (version 5.6).