The 2019 Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) National Diversity in STEM Conference was held October 31 - November 2 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. This is the largest multidisciplinary and multicultural STEM diversity event in the country, and Unidata was fortunate to be able to send staff member Jeff Weber to attend. Jeff was able to make valuable connections for Unidata and for the UCAR Community Programs (UCP) in general.

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.

Jessica Blunt

by Jessica Blunt
2019 Unidata summer intern

The overarching theme of my projects this summer has been improving the accessibility of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) for the average scientist. The IDV is a versatile and powerful, though complicated, program.

When I ask people if they've heard of the IDV, there are two types of answers that stand out. The first, a simple “no” or “I think someone mentioned it once.” The second, something like “I've tried to figure it out, but didn't get very far.” I worked to reach those who gave the second answer.

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).

The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.6 is now available. This is a major release with new features including an isentropic advection derived parameter, a 3D streamline display, new display types for the 3D grid tracer display, and a chooser for Geostationary Lightning Mapper data from ADDE servers. In addition, the release includes updates to existing features and incorporates the latest netCDF-Java library.

Registration will be opening shortly for Unidata's 2018 Software Training Workshop. The workshop features courses on Unidata's display and analysis packages MetPy, IDV, and AWIPS, as well as courses on data access and management tools including the Local Data Manager (LDM) and the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and netCDF.

Additional Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been created for Unidata technologies. We encourage you to use the DOIs when citing or otherwise referring to these technologies, because they provide a mechanism by which the information referred to can be found even if the web address underlying the DOI changes over time.

DOIs are strings of characters assigned by a registering organization to uniquely idenfity a digital resource such as a document, software package, data set, or other electronic “object.” Once a DOI is registered, metadata about the object can be associated with the identifier and maintained separately from the object itself, so that changes to the object's location can be reflected in the DOI's metadata.

Whether you caught Monday's solar eclipse from the totality zone, from your back yard, on the Internet, or skipped the whole thing, you might find a couple of things folks at Unidata have put together interesting. A big plus: no driving or traffic jams involved!

Read on to learn how to view the path of the moon's shadow across the continental United States in the IDV, and see some animations of the eclipse created with the MetPy package.