Editor's Note: Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU) is one of a handful of universities of varying sizes that have incorporated AWIPS II into labs and classrooms in the past two years. MSU's experience shows that incorporating the new NWS technology into the educational mix is both possible and useful even for a small undergraduate program. This article outlines the MSU AWIPS II configuration and discusses some of the adjustments the program made to get the system running smoothly.

Thanks to a Unidata Community Equipment Award grant coupled with some local resources from our university, we (Professor Sam Ng and co-PI Chris Kimmett) at Metropolitan State University in Denver have been able to successfully bring the National Weather Service's AWIPS II forecasting system into the classroom. Professor Ng used AWIPS II alongside Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer as core tools in the Spring 2015 “Weather Analysis Techniques” course for undergraduate meteorology majors, and will continue using AWIPS II in the Fall semester and into the future.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are now available for select 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.” DOIs have been created for the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), and the netCDF libraries. The DOIs are assumed to persist indefinitely, so they are preferable to using standard URLs in your citations. The DOIs are:

Students at Colorado State University

The Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) has a long history of research and education in all aspects of the atmospheric sciences. Faculty, students, and staff use a wide variety of datasets in their research and teaching, from numerical models to gridded reanalyses to radar and satellite observations to measurements collected in the field and lab. However, the students in the department recognized issues that were preventing these large datasets from being used to their full potential.

With a grant from the Unidata Community Equipment Awards program, along with a grant from the College of Engineering, the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science acquired a data storage server that makes many of these data sources readily and easily accessible to students.

Note to the Unidata community: Space at this Regional Workshop is still available, but register soon!

The University of South Florida, the Florida Institute of Technology, and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society are pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on April 10-12, 2015 (Friday through Sunday). Unidata Program Center staff will provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and other Unidata data and tools. In addition to the formal training sessions, there will be informal opportunities to interact with the UPC staff. Attendees are encouraged to "bring" their own data (preferably accessible from a remote access server) for exploration during the workshop.

Unidata's AMS booth

This year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting was held January 4-8 in Phoenix, Arizona. 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.

The University of South Florida, the Florida Institute of Technology, and the West Central Florida Chapter of the American Meteorological Society are pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on April 10-12, 2015 (Friday through Sunday). Unidata Program Center staff will provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and other Unidata data and tools. In addition to the formal training sessions, there will be informal opportunities to interact with the UPC staff. Attendees are encouraged to "bring" their own data (preferably accessible from a remote access server) for exploration during the workshop.

The University of South Florida is pleased to sponsor and host a Unidata Regional Workshop on April 10-12, 2015 (Friday through Sunday). Unidata Program Center staff will provide introductory and advanced training in the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV), the Repository for Archiving, Managing and Accessing Diverse Data (RAMADDA), and other Unidata data and tools. In addition to the formal training sessions, there will be informal opportunities to interact with the UPC staff. Attendees are encouraged to "bring" their own data (preferably accessible from a remote access server) for exploration during the workshop.

The IDV group recently received a request from a researcher to have the IDV display CF-compliant netCDF trajectory files. The IDV already has some limited capacity to handle these data. However, this particular request requires the IDV handle multiple trajectories in one CF-compliant file, which is currently not supported by the IDV. We would like to assist this researcher with these data.

Three new screencasts related to the IDV have been posted to the Unidata YouTube channel in the past month. Two are contributions from members of the IDV user community, and one was created by Unidata Program Center staff to explain several features of the newly released IDV version 5.0.

On Friday and Saturday, April 18-19, 2014, the University of Miami hosted a Unidata Regional Workshop on the use of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV); the open source Repository for Archiving, Managing, and Accessing Diverse DAta (RAMADDA); and data and tools available from Unidata.

The 21 workshop attendees included students and scientists from the University of Miami, the Florida Institute of Technology, the University of South Florida, and Duke University. While most of those attending were focused on meteorology or atmospheric and ocean science, the group included a conservation biologist studying geotagged Sooty Tern seabirds. Many attendees brought data sets used in their own research, which enhanced the workshop experience greatly.